Customer: National Department of Social Security
Industry: Government
Deployment Country: Spain
Solution: Spanish Government SOA initiative for inter-departmental and government-to-citizen reporting of online tax services
Products: Vordel XML Gateway, Software AG Adabas, Natural and EntireX, IBM WebSphere

Introduction:
The Information Administration of the Spanish Social Security, known as GISS is a group of Administrative Bodies and Public Entities designed to guarantee Spanish citizens, and non-national residents, a series of social security, health and economic benefits.

Business Objective:
As part of the Spanish Government's initiative to implement an eGovernment framework for the delivery of services to citizens, business customers and other government departments the GISS sought to expose sensitive tax-status information, in order that internal government departments could complete tax checks, prior to conducting business with these external users.

Business Challenge:
Several challenges were presented as firstly, the chosen product needed to ensure only authorized users had access at any time to particular information and services. Secondly, the solution needed to facilitate the monitoring of service delivery agreements and manage the roll out of new services to internal government departments and external citizens using these services.

Technical Challenge:
A prerequisite for any solution was that it would integrate with the existing SAML-based custom built access management system used by GISS. Furthermore, it would have to support the Service Oriented Architecture infrastructure built around IBM and Software AG products. Given that the Government's intention was that the existing services would eventually be extended to additional departments and citizens, the solution needed to be scalable and capable of meeting Service Level contractual response times.

Benefits/Results:

Secures the delivery of reusable services - built on top of existing IBM and Software AG mainframe systems within the Spanish Government's Services Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Reduced security administration costs - for government departments connecting into the service via the centrally administered Vordel Policy Director.

Increased ROI - the Vordel solution interfaced with the existing internal Identity Access Management platform using open standards. GISS were able to leverage its existing silos of user profiles and apply these to the protection of Web Services traffic.

Regulatory compliance - protection of data in keeping with all relevant data privacy regulations.

Effective Governance - to overcome the complexities arising from composite applications, different security zones, ongoing audit requirements and enforcement of prescribed Service Level Agreements

High level architecture diagram - Click to enlarge