DocuSign is now the electronic signature of choice for the federal government

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The U.S. government may finally embrace digital signatures, now that DocuSign is officially listed as a certified federal technology provider.

The electronic contract company announced Tuesday that it is officially certified by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) — making it the first and only digital signature tech approved for use across the country.

The first federal agency to hop on the DocuSign bandwagon is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which will use it internally for procurement and human resources.

“For months now the FCC has shown a keen interest in bringing the benefits of eSignatures to bear on its procurement and HR processes — so that’s where we’re starting to help the agency’s digital transformation,” Barton Phillips, the VP of public sector at DocuSign, said in a statement. “Once we’ve shown the value there, we hope to help the FCC across a multitude of other use cases, and to expand and meet the needs of many other Federal agencies.”

DocuSign already works with local government agencies — California alone uses it on a state level and in almost 400 cities — but FedRAMP authorization means it will be a lot easier for federal agencies to embrace electronic contracts for doing official business.

It could even change the Department of Motor Vehicles as we know it. While the DMV hasn't signed on to DocuSign yet, a representative for DocuSign said that he foresees it being used for titling and registration, as well as the general streamlining of interactions between the department and citizens.

FedRAMP is a government-wide service which vets technology providers for security and risk. It makes it so individual agencies don't have to do their own security checks on a case-by-case basis.

Many of the most ubiquitous enterprise technology companies have at least some of their products FedRAMP certified, including cloud services from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Office 365.

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