WHAT             Interoperability and secure data exchange

WHO               Mato Grosso and Amapá, Brazil

HOW               Connecting two states in a federated network via X-Road®

STATUS           Active

Secure data exchange is the backbone of any digital service provision – whether for citizens, employees, or businesses. But in the Federative Republic of Brazil, with twenty-six self-governing states and over 200 million people, how does such massive digital transformation get started? The case of two states – Mato Grosso and Amapá – illustrates how X-Road can help scale interoperability beyond regional borders in even the most challenging administrative arrangements. 

Interviewing stakeholders involved in the projects, we delved deeper into how X-Road came to be in the two states and how the technology supports digitalisation in a country like Brazil. The case study features:

  • Sócrates Barros, Project Manager of the Department of Digital Transformation from Technology Information Company of Mato Grosso (MTI); 

  • Lutiano Silva, President of Information Technology Management Center (PRODAP) in the State of Amapá; and 

  • Fernando Santos, Partner at the technology company RW3.

BACKGROUND AND INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK

The Brazilian Digital Transformation Strategy, E-Digital, establishes the guiding principles for national digitalisation. But when it comes to practical implementation, all twenty-six states pursue digital transformation independently.

Mato Grosso and Amapá are the first states in Brazil to have implemented X-Road as their default interoperability platform. The story of how the technology entered the states, however, follows different paths. “In Amapá, we first started with our government’s digital strategy,” Lutiano Silva explains. “When our current Governor was elected, one of his main goals was to enhance digital transformation to improve citizens’ lives,” he continues. Looking for best practice case studies, Amapá found the example of Mato Grosso, which had already taken significant steps towards public sector digitalisation. 

Although political will also played an essential role in Mato Grosso, the latter started with the technology before developing a broader strategy. “Around 2018, we were looking for ways to integrate all public services into a single platform to optimise the work of our departments,” Sócrates Barros recalls. “We had tried many times before but always ran into legal questions around data ownership,” he explains. But when technology company RW3 presented a business model based on the X-Road technology, and in partnership with the state, these obstacles started to be overcome.

NEEDS AND CHALLENGES

X-Road turned out to be the most fitting solution as it met the states’ needs for security, scalability, and data management. 

“For us, the most impressive feature was X-Road’s own security layer, which meant that we did not have to worry about all the security aspects separately, since X-Road provides certain security controls out-of-the-box,” Barros highlights with regard to Mato Grosso. “In Amapá, X-Road caught our attention because of its distributed architecture,” Silva underlines. “This solved many legal questions around data ownership because data storage did not have to be transferred elsewhere,” he says.

X-Road’s distributed architecture also ensures its scalability. “Expanding to 10, 20 or 30 different departments does not overwhelm the technical environment because it is distributed. So, it does not matter if you have only one server or thousands,” Barros adds, highlighting the technological potential for future expansion.

But X-Road is hardly ever a copy-paste solution. “One of the challenges we ran into with X-Road was that certification, in Brazil, follows its own framework,” Fernando Santos explains, having worked on the implementation of the technology with RW3. “We could not use a generic certificate and needed to implement a new certificate profile for the X-Road certificates,” he continues.

“Another technological challenge was posed by legacy systems. Most of the architecture would not fit the X-Road pattern, which would have technically meant re-writing all the services. Instead, we developed an adapter service component and published it as open-source,” Santos adds. “The adapter transforms any web service to fit the X-Road interface. By using this library to convert between the X-Road and government systems, we managed to make it more widely applicable,” he highlights.

THE SOLUTION

All the changes eventually came together under Brazil’s own platform, X-Via. In addition to the technical adaptations, the X-Via team also translated all open-source materials to Portuguese, making them widely accessible across Brazil. X-Via is now the default interoperability platform in Mato Grosso and Amapá, backing services for public sector employees, citizens, and businesses.

The next step is to connect the two states in a federated network and create a proof of concept beyond state-level interoperability. “We are currently negotiating the integration process on a strategic level and deciding which services should be implemented first,” Silva explains.

The most likely candidate for this is citizen identification, which is handled separately by all states in Brazil. With the current set-up, one person can hold multiple identity cards issued by different states, which among other matters, facilitates fraud crimes. “Our goal now is to ensure that X-Via is an accessible tool for all departments in Amapá and then start the integration of citizen identification with Mato Grosso,” he outlines.

The long-term vision is the integration with as many Brazilian states as possible. “First, we just want to prove that it can be done,” Santos says. “We need a concrete and well-functioning example in the Brazilian context, so other states have a better understanding of what is possible. Building one big solution for a huge country like Brazil is very challenging. But this is a challenge that the X-Road technology meets very well – being able to create one network for one state, another network for another state, and then federating them. Eventually, the nationwide solution could be built one single state at a time,” Santos encouragingly concludes.

Author: Adhele Tuulas