Enabling the Mobile Workforce With Secure Forms and Electronic Signatures

In this era of a largely remote and globally distributed workforce, where most workers want to be productive wherever they are — and on any device — it’s crucial to secure every endpoint from any threat that could compromise the security, prosperity, and integrity of an organization and its critical infrastructure. This is particularly true for governments and regulated industries.

Secure Forms for Productivity and Security

Forms are essential to all organizations, as they are a part of all important business processes, and a vital element of the customer journey. Forms are essential to collect information, progress the next best action, and deliver services. As with any heavily relied-on technology, forms’ security must be top of mind. Traditionally, the answer to this demand has been to gate our most mission-critical forms and documents behind cumbersome desktop technology. In this way, stakeholders had peace of mind that the verification of signature authenticity, and document chain-of-custody, could be protected and maintained.

BlackBerry Adobe Electronic Signatures Blog Embedded Image 2024

However, today’s workforce demands more options. Modern technology enables forms, and their connected digital document workflows, to deliver an optimized and personalized experience for the user — all while maintaining strong authentication, privacy, security, and adherence to data governance policies. As organizations continue to accommodate increasingly complex models for remote productivity, digital document workflows must flex with the times. They must be designed, deployed, and dispatched using intuitive interfaces and automation, across a wide range of mobile devices.

BlackBerry and Adobe: Innovation for Secure Mobile Productivity

To accomplish this forms maturity journey, BlackBerry and Adobe have partnered to deliver an innovative and secure digital document-signing solution, for governments and regulated industries. By combining BlackBerry Unified Endpoint Manager (UEM) and Adobe Experience Manager Forms, the two industry leaders have created a solution that is designed for mobile devices, yet still meets the rigorous security standards required by governments and the world’s most demanding enterprises.

This partnership between BlackBerry and Adobe enables the following outcomes:

  • It’s now possible to fill and sign forms with a smart card (i.e., CAC, PIV) easily and securely, from any device, anywhere, without requiring a VPN (virtual private network)
  • Automatically maintain verified credentials in a secure keystore
  • Granular management and document tracking capabilities are backed by the most trusted and reliable security in the market
  • Employees can leave sensitive desktop computing technology behind, at home or the office, minimizing security risks while enhancing user convenience

BlackBerry UEM leverages private key certificates to secure the connection to Adobe Experience Manager Forms, allowing employees to complete and sign forms and other documents from anywhere, on their corporate-issued or BYO (bring your own) mobile devices, and without a VPN.

Leveraging Security as a Strategic Enabler for Productivity

Enhancing productivity requires adopting dynamic, responsive, and mobile-friendly forms solutions that are easy to use. Adobe Experience Manager Forms embraces this, while enabling organizations to modernize their data capture and digital document workflows into a seamless, agile user experience. It allows users to capture data and authenticated signatures, and integrates into back-end systems to automate manual workflows. Adobe Experience Manager Forms also allows users to move away from paper or static PDF forms, while also embracing multiple benefits, including:

  • Responsive modern forms: Embrace operational modernization with mobile responsive, web-based forms, on any device, at any point in the discovering, filing, and signing process.
  • Scalable authoring: With the ability to create reusable sections and templates, and an easy drag-and-drop interface, Adobe Experience Manager Forms allows organizations to streamline business processes across the enterprise at scale.
  • Meaningful customer conversations: Powerful data integrations with pre-fill and multi-language support automatically personalize forms and communications, and trigger the next-best action.
  • Automation: Adobe Experience Manager Forms enables you to start on one device, then save and resume on another, to make end-to-end customer journeys faster. This reduces cost and saves time. Mobile and web-based forms combined with smart, certificate-based signature tools and automated workflows, help eliminate paper and laborious manual processes.

These outcomes, which have previously been considered out of reach for governments and regulated industries, are made possible by the best-of-breed security, and intuitive user experience, of BlackBerry UEM.

Awarded the most government security certifications of any unified endpoint manager, and approved for both classified and unclassified use, BlackBerry UEM is trusted by organizations around the world. Customers that trust BlackBerry UEM to keep them always-on, and securely connected, include the federal governments of numerous countries around the world, including the Canadian and U.S. governments, and many of the largest and most prestigious players in the global financial services industry. Announced earlier this year, BlackBerry UEM was named a 2023 Customers’ Choice for unified endpoint management tools on Gartner® Peer Insights™ — the only UEM tool to receive the distinction this year.

Digital document workflows should not be limited to desktop environments. Business value can no longer be delayed or denied by lack of mobile support for securely completing and signing electronic documents. Productivity must not come at the cost of security. The innovative partnership between BlackBerry and Adobe holds the answer.

Contact a member of our team today to learn more about how, together, BlackBerry and Adobe can help modernize your organization with the most secure forms and electronic signature technologies.

The Best of What’s New in Mobility

Many organizations have already invested significantly in projects that support mobility. The Center for Digital Government (CDG)’s 2021 Digital Cities and Digital Counties Surveys found that on average 85% of city respondents and 75% of county respondents are using location services, native mobile apps and text message/SMS channels. As organizations move forward with mobility, they should consider compute and storage capacity, end-to-end security, service design and delivery, and application rollout. Another important strategy is to have multiple options, so the organization can adjust to cost changes and inflationary pressures that could impact targeted business outcomes. Learn how your agency or municipality can move toward mobility in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

 

Driving Innovation with Mobility

“It comes down to identity and Zero-Trust concepts. Strongly authenticating someone and having confidence in their identity is especially important as organizations work with sensitive or private information. Organizations need to consider how users move through sensitive data from a strong authentication and authorization standpoint. That brings us to Zero- Trust development models. How do you architect to create a safe landing space for people to come in and then traverse into legacy systems where critical information is stored? How do you set up safe, well-orchestrated and known boundaries, so employees and the public don’t have challenges when they try to access data? That’s critical in your systems.”

Read more insights from Red Hat’s Chief Architect and National Technology Adviser, Kevin Tunks.

 

Mobilizing Your Enterprise Securely

GovTech July Mobility Blog Embedded Image 2022“The first challenge is education — understanding what mobile app security means; what the risks are; and what tools, techniques and processes should be employed. The second challenge is determining whether to build the program internally or leverage third parties. Setting up your own program and building a security team to do things like continuous testing, penetration testing, security analysis and supply chain risk management is costly and complicated. Most agencies are turning to commercial off-the-shelf packages or managed service providers that scan and vet mobile apps. Doing so provides instant intelligence on what security risks might live in those mobile apps, so organizations can decide whether to allow them.”

Read more insights from NowSecure’s Chief Mobility Officer, Brian Reed.

 

Addressing Today’s Mobile Threats

“A lot of Zero-Trust conversations today revolve around validating identity and making sure that a person is who they purport to be. However, if their device has a malicious payload when they’re granted network access, then all we’ve really done is identify that they were the source of the attack. We believe that when you validate the person’s identity, you must simultaneously do device attestation to validate the integrity of their device. Only then should the person be granted access to that particular resource or infrastructure. You can’t say you have Zero Trust if you haven’t attested the device. The two go hand-in-hand.”

Read more insights from Zimperium’s Vice President for Public Sector, Jim Kovach.

 

Moving from Mobile-First to Mobile-Only

“Organizations must secure all devices that process enterprise data. It’s important to look past “industry standard” protections of yesterday and embrace newer technologies that employ AI and machine learning to provide smarter, quicker and lighter-weight ways of protecting assets. In addition, it’s best to implement mobile-first architectures, 5G (as well as the anticipated 6G release) and cloud architectures simultaneously with their non-mobile infrastructure counterparts. Non-negotiables include yearly penetration testing, programs to review and test third-party applications within agency environments, and securing mobile devices as strongly as desktops. It’s also wise to ensure the security posture of cloud environments is equivalent to on-premises environments. Of course, securing data in transit and at rest is essential. Finally, end-to-end security can’t take a back seat to appeasing users’ demands.”

Read more insights from the BlackBerry Sales Engineering team.

 

Download the full Innovation in Government® report for more insights from these mobility thought leaders and additional industry research from GovTech.

The Best of What’s New in Hybrid and Remote Work

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in March 2020, agencies scrambled to expand secure connectivity and acquire mobile devices, but most state and local CIOs say their organizations transitioned relatively easily to working from home on an emergency basis. Now, with COVID-19 cases in the U.S. dropping dramatically and economies reopening, public agencies face a more complicated issue: figuring out where and how state and local government employees will work going forward. A 2020 CDG national survey found almost 75 percent of respondents anticipate hybrid work — where employees work from home at least on a part-time basis — will be their long-term model. The trend is particularly strong at the state level where just 16 percent of respondents anticipate returning to a fully in-person work environment. Read the latest insights from industry thought leaders in hybrid and remote work in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

 

Modernizing Contact Centers to Enable Remote Work

“To ensure callers have a secure, fluid and reliable customer experience, agencies must maintain diverse channels of communication. Another challenge is ensuring that contact center agents have secure and timely access to their agency’s database, intuitively orchestrated communications and sufficient bandwidth for reliable connectivity. Organizations also need to minimize the learning curve associated with introducing new endpoints such as Bluetooth-enabled headsets, softphones and web real-time communication (WebRTC), which eliminate the need for traditional desk phones and enable workers to use their laptop for voice or digital interactions.”

Read more insights from Genesys’s Senior Solutions Consultant, Ivory Dugar.

 

The Digital HQ: Flexible, Inclusive and Connected

“What we’ve seen over the past year hasn’t just been about working from home. It’s been working from home during a pandemic. As the pandemic has stretched into its second year, employees are feeling the strain. The data show that even though the work-from-home experience is better than working in the office full time, employee satisfaction with work-life balance has declined and stress and anxiety have increased. A contributing factor to that stress is the pressure to demonstrate productivity. A third of remote workers say they feel pressure to make sure their managers know that they’re working.”

Read more insights from Slack’s Future Forum Senior Relationship Manager, Dave Macnee, and Customer Success Leader for Public Sector, Kevin Carter.

 

IIG GovTech Blog Embedded Image 2021Giving Remote Workers Access to Resources They Need

“Centralized IT management and virtualization technology are critical to manage infrastructure and address changes quickly and at massive scale — whether that’s to patch a vulnerability across all user devices, upgrade applications or deploy additional computing resources. IT can make a change once via software and then distribute it to everyone’s device within minutes with minimal downtime. Software can monitor network traffic and resource utilization in aggregate and then automatically allocate resources as needed so organizations don’t have to invest in higher-performance user devices or purchase more hardware. In addition, organizations can isolate workloads and systems for security or other purposes, meaning multiple workloads and operating systems can run on the same device.”

Read more insights from NVIDIA’s Senior Manager of Public Sector, Chip Carr.

 

Managing Process and Cultural Change

“It’s projected that 30 to 35 percent of the public sector workforce will remain remote. A lot of these workers will probably be younger. To attract and engage the workforce of the future, you have to keep systems, processes and tools up to date. Younger people run their lives on their phone. If you expect them to submit to completely manual paper-driven processes, you’ll probably never get a chance to hire them, much less retain them. You also have to find out what they need to be successful in a remote environment; show them a path to promotion; and demonstrate that remote, hybrid and on-prem teams are aware of and understand their value to the organization.”

Read more insights from SAP Concur’s Senior Director of Public Sector, Jim McClurkin.

 

Navigating the New Frontier

“Having more flexibility and removing the location barrier opens up real opportunities, especially when it comes to competing for specialties like IT. Some states prohibit hiring out of state, but organizations can still widen the pool to include candidates beyond their local headquarters. They can recruit candidates who want to reside in areas with a lower cost of living or who don’t have the time to commute, for example. This flexibility also helps attract minorities and women, which in IT work, has been a real challenge.”

Read more insights from CDG Senior Fellow, Peter K. Anderson.

 

Download the full Innovation in Government® report for more insights from these hybrid and remote work thought leaders and additional industry research from GovTech.