e-Estonia Programme on x-Road

Estonians are pathfinders, who have built an efficient, secure and transparent ecosystem that saves time and money. e-Estonia invites you to follow the digital journey. The initial part introduces and demonstrates the underlying mechanisms involved in digitizing a society, an overview of the main challenges and policies, an understanding of the infrastructure, e-solutions and services.

<p style=”text-align: justify;”>X-Road® is a distributed information exchange platform that makes it possible for these different systems to communicate all across the governmental sector; for example, the police can access data from the health system, tax board or business registry and vice versa. But to do this X-Road must satisfy three criteria. First the platform must be interoperable and technically easy for each member of the system to access the data they need. Second, the data cannot be corrupted in transit by the system or an external third party. And third, the data must be protected from prying eyes so that unauthorised individuals cannot view the content of the data en route.</p>
<p style=”text-align: justify;”>X-Road® has satisfied all three criteria since 2001, performing all the required functions for the state and the people of Estonia. It has enabled to increase the depth of cooperation between public organisations and reduced paper work exponentially so that public employees can concentrate on tasks that require human interaction.</p>
<p style=”text-align: justify;”>Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS) is a non-profit association with the mission to ensure the development and strategic management of X-Road®  and other cross-border components for digital government infrastructure. The republics of Estonia, Finland and Iceland are members of NIIS.</p>
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Aktors is a leading implementator of e-government solutions. Aktors has been involved with the Estonian X-Road project since its very beginning.
Dr Aleksander Reitsakas, the current Chairman of the Management Board, was the first project manager of X-Road project in the consortium of companies implementing the first version of X-Road.

The X-Road is the backbone of e-Estonia and was initiated by the Estonian government to enable secure data exchange between governmental organisations. The first version was developed by Cybernetica and launched in 2001.

X-Road is a distributed information exchange platform that makes it possible for all different systems to communicate all across the governmental sector; for example, the police can access data from the health system, tax board or business registry and vice versa.

It has enabled to increase the depth of cooperation between public organizations and reduced paper work exponentially so that public employees can concentrate on tasks that require human interaction.