MPOnline


Introduction

The Government of Madhya Pradesh will launch its online citizen services portal developed by the Joint venture company between Government of Madhya Pradesh and TATA Consultancy Services Limited. MPOnline on the lines of the Vision of the GoMP, will provide citizen services in the areas of health, education, agriculture, government services, and business to the majority masses in the Rural Madhya Pradesh. By delivering a wide range of government-to-government (G2G) services from MPOnline, the government has improved transparency and accountability and reduced delivery cycles, thereby reducing cost of compliance with government regulation. The Portal and applications will be built on the latest technology farm, with applications on Microsoft DotNet. The portal will be deployed on the Blade servers to take advantage of the faster processing. The portal will be eventually deployed on the MPSEDC‘s State of the Art Data Center coming in Bhopal.

Unified Model of MP Online

Unified model of MPOnlineThe MPOnline Portal is visualized and viewed as a digital gateway for GoMP Departments. The Unified Model consists of thin UI layer, which is accessed by the users over the Internet & Intranet from a Browser front end. The Service layer of the model communicates to various applications of the GoMP departments in servicing the requests from the users. Citizen’s database is hosted in the Database layer of the model.

Single Sign-On

It is understood that the MP Online
Portal requires hosting various
e-services, which will be accessed
by citizens. These various services
could be access to payments, form
submissions, applying for certificates
subscriptions, etc. 
Single Sign-On (SSO) would be
administered for the MP Online project  
implementation. SSO would involve
authenticated access to all applications
that user is authorized to use-without
sending any passwords over the
network.
The suggested SSO solution will:

  • Include the capability to support
    security services beyond user
    authentication, such as
    confidentiality and integrity.
  • Scale well over the entire enterprise.

 

 

  • Be efficient in its use of network resources such
    as bandwidth.
  • Have sufficient administrative capabilities to
    support the size, diversity and distribution of
    the user community.
  • Use well-known, widely accepted,
    standards-based cryptography,
    protocols and APIs.
  • Be able to immediately deal with the
    emergency revocation of individual user
    IDs and passwords.
  • Enable one to quickly and efficiently
    bulk-load and activate large numbers
    of users.
  • Have the capability to support other components
    in the infrastructure beyond workstations
    and servers, such as routers,
    firewalls and network management systems.
 

To Be Application Architecture

The MPOnline Portal and its Web services will be implemented using Microsoft® Windows Server System™ integrated server software and the Microsoft .NET Framework Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server, Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0, Component Services, Content Manager, Oracle 10g database, and Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 form the hosting environment. The access points to the portal can either be provided through the kiosk in rural, city, or government departments. The presentation Layer consists of a browser-based user interface and a Web Service listener developed using Microsoft ASP.NET. The listener is responsible for receiving incoming messages containing requests for service, for parsing the messages, and for dispatching the request to the appropriate method on the business interface.

The Business Layer, will be built using the Microsoft Visual C#® development tool to implement the business logic of the application/s. It is subdivided into two parts:

  • The Business Façade uses Microsoft ASP.NET to provide a simple interface, which maps directly to operations exposed by the Web service.
  • The Business Logic layer provides all the services to the business façade.

 

The portal will access a variety of applications developed on DotNet. A public key infrastructure (PKI) layer provides an additional level of security for identification of the users and to ensure integrity of data while the data travels between the kiosk, other users, and the data centre.  Application-level security is maintained through user identification, authorization, and access management. In addition, at the database level, security is maintained by using audit trails and database encryption. The Data Access Layer presents a logical view of the physical data to the business layer. It isolates business logic from the underlying data stores, thereby ensuring the integrity of the data. Microsoft ADO.NET bridges the business logic layer to the data layer. Data replication between Data Center and the disaster recovery or business continuity site will exist.

Deployment Architecture

Microsoft Windows Server System forms the backbone of the MPOnline data center infrastructure. The MPOnline data center conforms to the Microsoft data center reference architecture for security, application hosting, data services, management, and networking services. The MPOnline data center infrastructure is collocated within an internet service provider’s data center that provides a state-of-the-art facility and ensures higher levels of physical security and high availability of the infrastructure.

To ensure a higher degree of security, the data center implements firewalls at the perimeter. These firewalls provide application-level filtering and use a host-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to help identify malicious activity from hackers on the firewall server.