Exostar's FIS on-demand digital credential service achieves SBCA cross-certification

Exostar, whose cloud-based solutions enable secure, cost-effective business-to-business collaboration, today announced that its Federated Identity Service (FIS) on-demand digital credential service is now fully-compliant with the SAFE-BioPharma® digital identity and signature standard. By cross-certifying with the SAFE-BioPharma Bridge Certificate Authority (SBCA), Exostar can now issue credentials that are compliant with SAFE-BioPharma and provide industry-recognized authentication and digital signature services for companies and their employees across the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries.

"We welcome Exostar as a partner in helping fulfill our vision of transitioning the biopharmaceutical and healthcare communities to paperless environments," said Mollie Shields-Uehling, president and CEO, SAFE-BioPharma Association.

FIS is Exostar's hosted, managed service for the issuance and maintenance of public key infrastructure (PKI) digital certificates. FIS is a comprehensive PKI solution that enables:

• Complete lifecycle management of certificates;
• Strong authentication practices;
• Controlled access to applications at a variety of authentication levels, including basic level of assurance (for both identity and secure email purposes), medium-software level of assurance, and medium-hardware level of assurance.

Because FIS is a hosted service, Exostar handles everything, including on-boarding, training, support, and even in-person proofing when required. With FIS, companies can minimize risk and assure their resources and intellectual assets are protected over the extended enterprise.

FIS has been cross-certified with the aerospace and defense (A&D) industry's CertiPath bridge since 2007. To date, Exostar has issued nearly 16,000 credentials that are compliant with CertiPath policies for customers in 32 countries worldwide. This wealth of experience allowed for rapid completion of cross- certification with SAFE-BioPharma.

"We are proud to be the first organization that has been certified by both the SAFE-BioPharma Association and CertiPath," said Vijay Takanti, Vice President of Security and Collaboration Solutions at Exostar. "We look forward to applying the lessons learned and successes from our A&D experience to another critically important industry. We see our SBCA cross-certification as the first step of an ongoing, longer-term commitment where we leverage our investment in the development of a suite of identity management services and ecosystem of 70,000 organizations to bring similar benefit to the pharmaceutical and healthcare communities."