E-Signature Solution Must Address BYOD and BYOC to Engage Employees

SutiSign and services like it provide SaaS-based business processes that can be accessed from any device that has an internet connection. This dovetails with the growing need for IT departments to work with employee preferences for using their own personal devices to interact with work systems – BYOD (bring your own device).

The other concept that needs attention is then BYOC: Bring your own credentials

Here is a white paper on the topic, which comes through Webtorials.com courtesy of SecureKey.

This concept is straightforward: Do you let employees set the ?know your employee? identities that give them access to the system? This could be allowing the employees to:

• Choose their own password
• Choose their own account ID
• Have choices for challenge/response questions like ?what is your mother?s maiden name??
• Choose a preferred image, if your interface demands that additional authentication step.

Your company needs to determine what works best for their security needs, but still allow some personalization that makes it easier for employees to remember their log-in credentials. Ease-of-use cuts down on administrative oversight for employees who forget their codes and need resets, which is less trivial a burden than you might think.

But, the biggest risk from BYOC is the fact that employees will keep it simple. As noted in the SecureKey white paper:

?Many users will employ the same access credentials for multiple systems, so determining the username/password combination for one system will grant access to multiple systems. For example, in the survey we conducted for this white paper, 82% of respondents Indicated that they sometimes use the same username/password combination for multiple applications or systems.?

This puts the system at risk to hackers, so the balance you strike on BYOC must be thought through, and monitored constantly.

E-Signature Software Offers Flexibility

With e-signature softwares, the need to identify the signers is critical, especially for critical transactions like loan documents and formal business contracts. So, we built the system to allow you to vary the level of the authentication regime by document to meet the needs of each transaction. Internal documents might rely solely on the fact that the e-mail is opened. A more complicated agreement may demand biometric signatures.

We simply provide the options. You set the parameters that meet your business needs, giving you the flexibility to meet BYOD and BYOC preferences to better engage your employees in the tools you install.

Have you created a system to address BYOC employee needs? What has the employee response been? Did your software tools allow the flexibility to provide options based on specific project, system or person?