Unique ID will sit on eGovernance cloud platform

According to Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the UID application will be architected for the cloud and will sit on an “eGovernance cloud platform,” that will be assembled using open architecture and components.
Providing UID application overview and requirements, the authoriy observes that cloud computing is fast emerging as the next generation computing paradigm to build and deploy Internet applications targeting large sets of geographically dispersed users.
Further, the utility of cloud computing is in that it facilitates these applications to be deployed and managed in distributed systems across data centres and provide clean abstraction for low level resource and application management. Typically these deployments are highly virtualised and help business to use processors, memory, disks and network in an optimal way.

Justifying the rationale of architecting UID Application on the eGovernance Cloud Platform, the authority says next generation applications should be architected and deployed over such a computing platform to take advantage of scale and elasticity of the cloud. Given the humongous nature and immense scale of the ambitious UID project, the authority notes that a private cloud deployment is very appropriate for eGovernance applications and governments in various countries are rapidly adopting this platform.

Three-tiered layer
UIDAI, the authority says, will work with experts and platform providers to design and architect this platform and specific procedures for building, sharing and deploying this platform will be worked out in due course of time. According to the UIDAI, the eGovernance Platform will consist of mainly three layers namely back office layer, infrastructure layer and operations layer.
The back office layer will consist of administrative modules such as analytics and monitoring, fraud detection, billing and CRM and customer and tech support.
The infrastructure layer will consist of system components such as distributed computing platform, application server, distributed caching service, event management, audit and logging system, process management, application monitoring and management, alert and task management and business workflow processor and rule engine.

The operations layer would comprise of components that help administer the data centre and services of UID system and will include data centre operations and management modules, network management, data backup and archival and disaster recovery system. Incidentally, the UID application will comprise of twin layers of interface and application.
The interface layer, says the authority, will be the only way in which UID system can be accessed by the outside world. It supports the key enrolment and authentication services as well as makes available portals and other analytics and monitoring reports to both end users –– the residents as well as the eco-system of UID partners.
The application layer will comprise of two components –– enrolment server and authentication server. On its part, the enrolment server takes in a request for UID enrolment and after establishing the uniqueness of the resident using biometric de-duplication assigns a UID number. On the other hand, the authentication server will provide several ways in which a resident can authenticate themselves using the UID online system.
DH News Service