Gofore is pioneering an ethical digital world – on an international scale! Sounds good, doesn’t it? And you know what, it feels even better if you have a chance to do it as your everyday work.
We believe digitalisation can and should be a force for good. We believe that this is the core of our existence and it has to show in everything we do. As a consultancy company, our main impact on the world becomes evident through our customers. One of the best examples of making an impact is our contribution to X-Road®.
Gofore is an X-Road Technology Partner with expertise in core development, deployment of X-Road instances, and service integrations. Our projects have included consultations for potential X-Road implementation, instance implementations, software developments, training for local experts, and upgrades to the newest versions of X-Road. This means that we can help you all the way if you are considering implementing a free and open-source data exchange layer solution.
X-Road is an open-source data exchange layer solution that enables organizations to exchange information securely over the Internet. X-Road is released under the MIT open source license and is available free of charge.
Some examples, what is the impact and the potential of X-Road in the world:
- 3 out of the 5 most advanced digital societies use X-Road: Denmark (Faroe Islands), Estonia, and Finland.
- It’s distributed deployment model is resilient against cyber attacks.
- X-Road might be the solution that will be used by the World Health Organisation.
Our journey with X-Road goes back in 2015. Finland had decided to implement X-Road. We were one of the companies that supported Finland’s overall National Service Architecture implementation. The whole program consisted of roles and authorizations, service views, digital authentication, and data exchange layer. In June 2015 we started the work on the Finnish X-Road implementation project and we were responsible for the development of X-Road 6 based on the Finnish requirements. We collaborated closely with the Estonian private and public sector because at that time X-Road version 6 was under development and was not publicly available in GitHub. So many things have changed since then and it is one good example of how fast things can be done also in the public sector! The source code of the Security Server was published in GitHub on 18.11.2015 and soon after that, the whole X-Road solution became open source.
What surprised us already 5 years ago, and what keeps us continuously excited about the solution, are the principles upon version 6 and later versions are built.
- X-Road embraces diversity. It is one of those solutions that accept that organizations are different, their information systems are different, their needs are different. It allows us to standardize secure cross-organisational data exchange with rather small adjustments to the organizations no matter the sector or business domain. That eases its implementations a lot.
- Born to be international. X-Road version 6 has a built-in capability for the federation of X-Road instances. It is widely known as a feature that enables cross-border data exchange, but it can be used successfully to adjust the solution for circumstances when one country has several implementations.
After the successful implementation of X-Road in Finland, the governments of Estonia and Finland decided that they are interested in the joint development of X-Road and they established the Nordic Institute of Interoperability Solutions (NIIS). NIIS ensures the quality, sustainability, and cross-border capability of core e-government infrastructure components. Gofore provides the X-Road Software Core Development Services for NIIS since 2018, based on a 3-year agreement. We have also made pro bono contributions to the source code to create a positive impact. This is the opportunity for anyone, who is interested!
Our multidisciplinary team around X-Road activities includes employees from our offices in Finland, Spain, and Estonia. We have provided our consultations on all the continents around the world, except Australia and Antarctica! Our strength is to bring the international teams together even in a remote working mode and turn our customer’s dreams into working solutions.
Tuuli Pärenson
International Business Development
