Digitary initiative first to go live in UK’s ‘Higher Education Cloud’
Digitary initiative first to go live in UK’s ‘Higher Education Cloud’ Jonathan Dempsey, Digitary’s CEO
DCU Invent-based company Digitary has secured funding from the UK government to build a secure document shared service for universities as part of a £12.5m investment under the Universities Modernisation Fund.
The initiative will be the first service to go live in the UK’s ‘Higher Education Cloud’ which aims to bring the benefits of cloud computing to universities that have traditionally implemented standalone systems on-campus.
Digitary was established as Framework Solutions in 1999 to provide security software design and development services for large corporate and third-party systems for clients such as Intel, Siemens and Baltimore Technologies.
The company began working with the higher education sector in 2002 on the development of the Digitary system for the secure online issuing and authentication of tamper-evident official graduation documents.
It changed its name to Digitary in February 2007 and now counts all Irish institutes of technology, most Irish universities as well as universities in Portugal and Australia among its customers.
In the UK, it is already used by leading UK universities, including the London School of Economics, University of Cambridge and University of Manchester.
Universities use the system to replace paper documents with digitally signed electronic documents and to replace manual processes with automated processes. This makes graduation documents more secure and saves money.
Seven UK universities of varying sizes and types are due to be live on the new service by the end of March.
“We are delighted to get official approval and we are in discussions with a large number of institutions that are interested in the new service,” said Jonathan Dempsey, Digitary’s CEO.