At a glance
- Sector: Government — national digital infrastructure
- Our role: We led the programme that stood up a nation's interoperability platform and the cybersecurity capability around it
- Scope: 14 work packages — from impact assessment to a live platform, governance and national cyber
Challenge
Going digital, for a government, is not a single system. It is getting dozens of ministries, departments and agencies to share data securely, lawfully and at scale — without every integration becoming a bespoke project. Most never get there: data stays locked in silos, each cross-agency service is rebuilt from scratch, and there is no shared trust, no common security baseline, no governance to hold it together.
Estonia solved this two decades ago — with a national ID code, X-Road and digital signatures. The task here was to give another nation the same foundation — not just the software, but the organisation, the law, the services and the cybersecurity that turn it into something a country can actually run.
Approach
RaulWalter led the programme end to end — fourteen work packages that together stand up a national interoperability capability:
- it began with an impact assessment and a platform plan;
- the interoperability platform itself, built on open-source X-Road, deployed across four environments — including a high-security tier for sensitive citizen data;
- the organisational, business and legal model around it: a policy-setting authority, an operator, member agencies, standard connection and data-use agreements, and a National Interoperability Framework;
- the first priority services and relying parties — integrating the agencies that matter first, with eID integration so people can be identified across the platform;
- a national cybersecurity framework setting the security baseline for the whole ecosystem;
- and knowledge transfer, so the government's own people could operate and grow it.
Common throughout: secure-by-design architecture, PKI- and HSM-backed trust, and the governance that makes an exchange over the platform legally equivalent to a signed document.
Outcome
What we delivered was not a system but a capability — the foundation a country builds its digital government on.
- 14 work packages delivered end to end — from impact assessment to a live interoperability platform
- A national data-exchange backbone on X-Road, across four environments with a high-security tier for sensitive data
- The full machinery around it — an organisational, legal and governance model, a National Interoperability Framework, and standard membership agreements
- Priority agencies integrated, eID identification across the platform, and a national cybersecurity framework setting the baseline
- Built to be owned and run by the government itself, through structured knowledge transfer