Carsten Stöcker, co-founder and CEO at Spherity is to deliver a presentation on How an Entire Industry Adopts Digital Enterprise Identity on Wednesday, September 15 starting at 3:30 pm at EIC 2021.
To give you sneak preview of what to expect, we asked Carsten some questions about his planned presentation.
The current state is determined by industry players and governments that are realizing the importance of digital identity. It's a part of digital identity for interactions on the internet for digital transformations and for digitalization of public services. And this is not only happening here in Germany - the European Union, for example, is pushing very hard for the so-called EU digital identity wallet. There's a large movement in the government to put this in place to stay competitive. It's digitalization of our societies and industries, but it's also happening in the US and in Asia. A lot of governments and enterprises have realized the importance and are now starting to adopt technology to push this into a field test to experiment with regulatory frameworks, to get these technologies into production.
Yeah, it's not just important. It's also mandatory. And if you look at the sheer numbers, so I, as a corporate, or as a government have terabytes and terabytes of data in my IT systems, but today I don't have any instruments to check the authenticity of the data. So who provided the data, which citizen, which customer, which IoT device, which business partner provides the data? I don't have any instruments. And I also don't have enough instruments to check the integrity of the data. And that's now changing with digital identity technology built upon public key infrastructure. I suddenly have some tools to check the authenticity, integrity, provenance of my data. I can trust my data even more and especially in use cases where I have to interact with a lot of previously unknown supply chain actors. So this is a must-have capability for the circular economy.
Think about supplier onboarding. Can I trust if my supplier is real or fake? What credentials do they have are they compliant with environment, health and safety standards? Do I trust the IoT device? I cannot answer these questions today, but with digital identity digital signatures, I get all the instruments to bring digitization to the next step. And, not only to improve the business policies, regulatory requirements, but also improve cybersecurity quite a bit.
So we experienced most adoption in ecosystems that have a clear problem to be solved, especially when it's regulatory problems, regulatory requirements where I must do something, I must prove something, I must verify something, and we are experiencing a lot of adoption when there is a government push. Um, for example, in Europe, in Germany, governments want to keep up with digitization and have understood digital identities and their core capabilities. They really push hard to build entire ecosystems. And that's of fundamental importance because this technology is not just for one company, It's for entire ecosystems. It needs to be adopted by a lot of supply chain and value chain actors and ecosystem actors. And that's so crucial. So crucial role as a government to push hard, to get the entire ecosystems in place and even help out with some regulatory requirements and regulatory requirement amendments. And there we are experiencing the biggest adoption when it comes to early productive systems and productive field tests.
Yeah, sure. I will talk about the so-called the US drug supply chain security act, and there's one requirement that's the authorized trading partner requirement. What problem does it solve? It basically solves the problem that previously unknown supply chain actors, such as the manufacturer and the wholesalers they’ve never met before, but they would like to exchange data. Then the law says you must authorize and authenticate your supply chain partner, which means I, as a wholesaler, when I'm interacting with the manufacturer, I must check, is this the real manufacturer and ask the manufacturer if they have a state license to manufacture pharmaceutical products. I must check the state license.
Today, that's a manual process. The process takes a long time and with digital identity and verifiable signatures - this can be fully digitized. In addition, what we also speak at EIC. So we talk about role of partnerships, strong partnerships to build an entire ecosystem and to drive full adoption of an entire industry domain, um, because only if the full adoption could be achieved, then this is a massively scalable technology. And yeah, interested in this use case, learn more at the EIC and join our talk.
