Guy Krige, a director at Escrow Europe, received an award from a UK-organised seminar held in Uganda late last month.
The award, handed over by Madan Rao of organising company Extensia, acknowledged Krige’s expertise and ability to demonstrate how companies whose day-to-day operations are reliant on IT should tackle corporate governance and business continuity.
Krige’s presentation was entitled “Active Software Escrow – Addressing the risks to business inherent in third party owned, controlled or hosted software products” and it formed part of a series of keynote addresses presented at Innovation Africa Digital Summit 2017 held in Kampala from 24 to 26 April.
Escrow Europe is South Africa’s longest-established provider of active software escrow services and the only BEE, ISO quality and Microsoft Dynamics certified provider of active software escrow in the country.
As a director at Escrow Europe, Krige is responsible for critically examining the IT governance and business continuity requirements laid out in King IV and assisting business’s existing clients ensure their ongoing compliance with these.
Active software escrow, which provides a business with guaranteed access to the source code material for its mission critical systems, is the most cost effective and efficient solution for managing the multifaceted risks and due diligence obligations facing directors.
As an independent and neutral third party, the escrow service provider safeguards the business-critical IP upon which their client organisations absolutely depend by holding verified copies of the material as an escrow deposit. Source code is one example, important databases and/or industrial designs are others.
Under specific circumstances agreed in advance and embodied in an escrow agreement – for instance, failure to perform on the part of the software supplier (for whatever reason – insolvency, hostile buy-out etc) – the escrow service provider is authorised to release the escrow material to the escrow beneficiary for the purposes of the beneficiary’s business continuity.
Krige graduated from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 1996 with a BA in Law and Political Science and completed a postgraduate LLB at Howard College. He served his articles in Durban and was admitted to the Supreme Court as an attorney in 1996.
A major part of his role at Escrow Europe is complementing founder Andrew Stekhoven’s sales and marketing initiatives. Stekhoven consulted to the King III team and was a member of the working party contributing to King IV.