Fidus is up and running!

That’s it: the Regional Services Integrator (RSI) has been named Fidus and is now operational!
Reminder: a services integrator collects and exchanges electronic data with legal value (authentic sources) from and between administrations and thus reduces the administrative burden for the general public and for businesses alike.

On 8 May 2014, the Brussels Parliament adopted an order on the creation of an RSI. The BRIC was given the task of setting up this platform between the regional services but also with the federal level and the other federal entities.
The Brussels Region RSI is now operational! It's name:  Fidus.

Security aspect

One of the challenges facing an RSI is, of course, security. Data access is granted only to certain institutions specifically covered by authorisation from the Privacy Commission or the Brussels Auditing Board.
Moreover, traces of all connections must also be kept ‘so as to be able to say at all times who has had access to what, when, for what purpose and with what result’, explains Dominique Le Grelle, head of the RSI project.
In practical terms, connection to the RSI is established via two ‘buses’: a ‘Security Gateway’ specifically dedicated to security, and a ‘Business bus’ to route authentic data. ‘We opted in favour of open source technology, WSO2. This is what eBay uses to supervise all its transactions which are far more numerous than those we will have on the RSI”. In addition, an 'Identity Management’ module is used to check that the person who connects is authorised to access the RSI.

Three types of records are planned:

• an ‘Audit Log’, accessible to the CISO (Corporate Information Security Officer), which lists data access. This information is kept for six months and archived for ten years
• a ‘Business Log’ which records the same accesses but without the personal data. This information is used to draw up statistics, prepare reports, etc.
• a ‘Technical Log’ which is used to search for bugs, for example.

The data

Between now and the end of 2015, the following data will be accessible:

• natural persons and the composition of their family, taken from three registers (population register, foreigners’ register and waiting list)
• disabilities (Federal Public Service for Social Security)
• businesses (Banque Carrefour des Entreprises – central business database)
• architects (Order of Architects)
• vehicles (Vehicle Registration Directorate)
• heritage (Federal Public Service for Finance).

The platform will also support exchanges between suppliers and the regional public services for electronic invoicing (Mercurius project).

The infrastructure

To ensure impeccable quality of service, Fidus is deployed on an infrastructure comprising around thirty virtual machines and divided between two separate sites interconnected by redundant links. This infrastructure provides almost perfect outage tolerance. Any modification to this infrastructure, whether to the hardware or the software, undergoes preliminary testing in separate testing and acceptance environments before going into production. The links with authentic sources and with users are protected by certificates ensuring state-of-the-art security.