"sproof helps us to combine security and efficiency" - Dominik Engel, FH Salzburg

One of our research centers at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences has been working on the proof of green energy and has researched different ways of providing this proof. Through digital signatures, through blockchain technologies - and two dissertations emerged from these considerations. One of these was a dissertation on the topic of sproof, which later led to a spin-off.

If you look at the number of students, the FH Salzburg is actually a large company. We have 3,500 students and therefore a whole range of people who sign or receive signed documents from us. We therefore use sproof sign for external contract signing, but also for all our internal processes. Be it a personnel form or that we have to approve a purchase requisition or something similar internally. The qualified electronic signature is used for almost all of our contracts. For example, if we have a large research project, this is also handled via sproof sign.

The FH Salzburg pursues a cloud-first strategy for many areas: It is of course particularly important for us: We handle personal data, we have many young people who are taking their next step in education with us, so we naturally have to handle the data entrusted to us with absolute care. This means that data protection is a high priority for us. That's why we rely on a European solution; the IT security has to be right. At sproof, we have the great advantage that we rely on a European or Austrian solution and we can rely on the data being stored with the appropriate care. The server data is therefore stored 100% in a European cloud infrastructure. International data centers would be out of the question for us. We cannot and do not want to store our data there.

As an early adopter, we have been involved right from the start. We have gradually made more and more of our systems signature-enabled, integrated ingle Sign On and now, for the most part, it's just a click and the signature is guaranteed.

sproof sign has also shown us the advantage that we can integrate it directly into our student management systems together with sproof's development department and our own IT department, which has worked very well.

The integration of sproof sign is so seamless that no special training is required. We point out sproof to our new colleagues once during the welcome day, but extensive training is not necessary.

Internationalization is a very important goal of the FH Salzburg. In recent months and years, we have greatly increased our student mobility, as well as staff and teaching mobility. This is happening throughout Europe and it is of course very valuable if, for example, a Spanish or French digital signature has the same place on the contract as an Austrian signature.

This is very important to us. Digital signatures must be easily and clearly verifiable. With the audit function, we can see who signed when and with which certificate. We want to know exactly who signed when and this is made very easy with the solution. However, it is also important for us that the signatures can also be verified with any other common Office solution. So if someone wants to check it in Adobe Reader, for example, he or she will also see that the signatures are valid.

In a way, sproof GmbH is a spin-off of the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences, founded by two doctoral students, Fabian Knirsch and Clemens Brunner, from the Center for Secure Energy Informatics. It is particularly pleasing that the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences was on board as an early adopter from the very beginning. sproof was created in the FH Startup Center, our own incubator so to speak, and took its first steps there. This initial idea has developed very well and, as a university of applied sciences, we are very proud when our spin-offs develop so successfully. We are of course very proud to observe this development.