1. What is NSDG?
NSDG (National e-Governance Services Delivery Gateway) is a standards based middleware for achieving secure messaging and interoperability across departmental applications. For more details, visit
http://www.nsdg.gov.in
2. What is SSDG?
SSDG stands for the State e-Governance Services Delivery Gateway. SSDG is a productized version of NSDG. SSDG has been envisaged to be deployed at the State level to facilitate message exchange between the applications in the State.
3. What is the basic difference between NSDG and SSDG?
The vision for NSDG is to service the Central MMPs and Line Ministries. The State Gateways are being installed in the State Data Centres and will service all the State Departments and Line Ministries. The State Gateways and the National Gateway are interconnected forming a constellation of Gateways servicing the needs of various departments across the length and breadth of the country.
4. What are Domain Gateways?
The gateways implemented in specific business verticals/departments for the respective projects to route requests between their front end and back end applications are known as Domain Gateways. Various departments at the Centre or at the State level may have the requirement of their own gateways to address their business specific requirements.
5.Who is a Service Provider?
The back-end government departments offering e-services to citizens and businesses, and to other government departments, are collectively referred to as Service Providers (SP).
6. Who is a Service Access Provider?
You can register yourself either as a SAP(Service Access Providers) or as a SP(Service Provider). SAP will register themselves with the NSDG to provide access to the certain e-Governance services to citizens. SPs will be mainly the government departments which will provide e-Governance services. They need to register their services with the NSDG.
7. What is Gateway Service Provider (GSP)?
A GSP is an agency who undertakes the operation and maintenance activities of a specific installation (Central, State or Domain) of the Gateway.
8.Who is the Gateway Service Provider for NSDG?
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Mumbai (C-DAC) has been entrusted the responsibility of operation and maintenance the Gateway on behalf of the Government of India.
9. What is the Gateway Constellation?
NSDG has been developed to service the Central MMPs. SSDGs’ are the productized version of NSDG, which are being installed in the various State Data Centres. The SSDG’s will service the various State Government departments. Domain Gateways’ are being set up in various MMPs’ in order to service the specific needs of the MMP. The SSDGs’, NSDG and Domain Gateways are interconnected via the Internet to form a constellation of Gateways, which will help service the various departments across the length and breadth of the country.
10. What is National Services Directory (NSD)?
The National Services Directory (NSD) is the central registry of all Gateways and their services in the Gateway Constellation. If any service is not available in the local Gateway then gateway can resolve the service with the help of NSD.
11.What is the reason for connecting different GoI departments?
Unlike point to point connections between departments which create a mesh and also does tight coupling between applications, National e-Governance Service Delivery Gateway is a standards based messaging switch which simplifies this task by providing seamless interoperability and exchange of data across heterogeneous departmental applications because of a set of e-Governance Gateway Standards (IIP, IIS, IGIS) that are based on open standards (XML and SOAP). Thus this middleware infrastructure will serve as a one stop shop for all the Government departments who need these common services in their workflows for providing services to the citizens and to delink the front-end from back-end.
About Integration
12.What is the reason for connecting different GoI departments?
A Department can register themself either as a SAP (Service Access Providers) or as a SP (Service Provider) or both. SAP will register themself with NSDG/SSDG to provide access to e-Governance services to citizens. SPs will be mainly the government departments who will provide e-Governance services.
13.How do I get information regarding integration with NSDG?
An Integration Kit will be provided at the time of integration of services with NSDG. This kit provides a comprehensive overview of how the various entities viz Service Providers, Service Access Providers and Domain Gateway Providers can access the Gateway and the Policies in place for these associations.
The document provides in depth insight into the procedure for accessing the Gateway in terms of the Forms to be completed and Authorizations to be furnished for gaining access to the Gateway. It further provides the list of reports that the various entities that associate with the Gateway will receive.
14. How do I integrate with NSDG?
CDAC-Mumbai is the GSP (Gateway Service Provider) for NSDG. CDAC will provide the generic connectors and guidelines for facilitating communication with the Gateway. Connectors are generic enough to permit you to develop your portal in any language on any platform.
15. What platform is NSDG available on?
NSDG is designed and developed using Open Standards and Open source facilities. Details are available on request.
16.I have a Dot Net application. Can I integrate with NSDG?
Any Dot Net application can integrate with NSDG/SSDG. This will require making some changes to your application so as to call the web service of the NSDG based on the IIP and IIS protocols.
The other option is to use the Dot Net Connector provided by the CDAC to communicate with the NSDG.
17. I have a legacy system running in my department. Can I integrate it with NSDG?
Yes, you can. Necessary additions will have to be undertaken in the legacy application in order for it to communicate with NSDG based on IIP and IIS protocols.
18. I have already published a web-service for my application. Do I need to use NSDG? How can I benefit?
Web services makes ones platform ready for interoperability (provided certain disciplines and conformances are obeyed). We appreciate the readiness of a department to interoperate which has published its services as web-service. The following will be the two key benefits of exposing the service via the Gateway vis-à-vis a purely Webservices model.
- A readily available PKI based security perimeter thereby reducing levels of information security infrastructure for department.
- A channel for locating and providing services from and to other departments.
19. How can I integrate my published web-service with NSDG?
You have a choice of building and deploying web-service proxies for the Gateway's web-service. Alternately, you may opt for CDAC services to provide you generic connectors and guidelines for interfacing with Gateway's web-service.
20.I am from a Government Department. How can NSDG benefit me?
A department connecting to NSDG would observe following benefits
- The middleware ensures end to end secure communication between the service seeker and the service provider.
- By connecting to a Gateway in the Gateway constellation, the departmental applications can avail all the services offered by other departmental applications connected to the Gateways in the constellation. A department can provide joined up/integrated services by using the services of other departmental applications connected to the Gateway constellation.
21.I want to provide Government Services on my portal. How can I use NSDG for the same?
For this you will have to integrate your portal application with the NSDG. The portal will have to be registered with NSDG as a Service Access Provider (SAP)Either you can integrate your application yourself by changing your application to communicate with NSDG based on IIP and IIS protocols or you can use connectors provided by CDAC for integration with NSDG.
22. How do I inter-operate my middleware with NSDG?
There are two ways of connecting any middleware to NSDG. One may use CDAC supplied connectors to connect to NSDG. This may require some customization in the department’s application.
The second option is to directly connect using SOAP over HTTP based on IIP/IIS specifications.
Security
23. How can I obtain standards for communication with NSDG?
Standards will be made available on request. An email can be sent to mpta@cdac.in.
24. What data encryption mechanism is used by NSDG?
The gateway provides the option for use of digital signature and certificates to all stakeholders interacting with the gateway for identification, authentication and authorization. The SHA1 and W3CSigned authentication is in use to restrict unauthorized access from SAP to its Services with the help of these authentication mechanisms. NSDG provides the following three levels of authentication.
- Authentication with username and password
- Authentication using encryption technique
- Authentication using W3C signatures
25. Is NSDG secure? What security features implemented at gateway?
Yes it is secure. The following three features have been implemented at gateway:-
- Security compliance of the NSDG infrastructure as per ISO 17799:2005/BS7799-1:2005.
- PKI based Authentication at NSDG – ensures integrity, non-repudiation, and confidentiality for End to End secure message exchange.
- Use of bidirectional SSL for end to end communication thereby ensuring security during transmission of messages.
26. Is there any front-end application to register the service with NSDG?
No. The registration is currently manual for the SP’s and SAP’s to register with NSDG/SSDG. In order to integrate with NSDG, the Service Provider (SP) and Service Access Provider (SAP) needs to furnish Enrolment and Registration forms with proper authorizations (Technical and Administrative) to gain access to NSDG.
27. How do NSDG ensure that the services of the SP are being accessed by authorized Service Access Providers?
The criteria of access control would be defined by the SP for a given service at the time of registration with the Gateway provider.
28. What is Connector?
A connector is a software module for facilitating interfacing with gateway (protocol conversion). Gateway communication based on IIP/IIS grammar and application need not be aware of IIP/IIS structuring in order to be able to communicate with Gateway.
29.Will C-DAC provide the connector to SP / SAP?
In order to connect to a Gateway, two connectors are required – Generic Connector and Application specific connector. The generic connector is provided by CDAC – Mumbai free of charge. However the application specific connector will have to be developed by SP/SAP.
30. Is there any automated notification for services which will be added or deleted by SP at later stage?
This facility is not available as of now. This feature is planned for rollout in the next release.
31. What is synchronous and asynchronous communication?
- Synchronous Services: The services that require the connection between SAP (service seeker) and SP (service provider) to be present from the point of request to the time that the service response is received from the SP are called Synchronous service. For e.g.: - Verify Unique ID of Citizen.
- ASynchronous Services: Services that do not require continuous connection between SAP and SP fall under the category of Asynchronous services. In this type of a service, SAP requests a service from NSDG and NSDG sends the acknowledgement back to SAP. NSDG forwards the request to the SP and once a response is received from the SP, NSDG forwards the response to the SP. For e.g : - Request for Birth Certificate.
32. Who decides that a particular service is synchronous or asynchronous?
The SP decides the mode of the Services at the time of registering the service with NSDG. The SAP will be able to access the Services only in the mode specified by the SP during registration s with the Gateway.
33. What is the solution in case the payload size is greater than 2 MB?
Payload that is larger than 2 MB can be split at one end and merged at the other. The functionality can be achieved through an add-on connector. The feature is currently being developed for NSDG and will be available soon to all departmental applications who want to exchange messages of size more than 2 MB with other departments connected to NSDG/SSDG.
34.What is the version of .Net required for the integration with the Gateway?
.Net framework version 2.0 and above can be used for integration with the Gateway.
35. What is the scalability in terms of message throughput available for NSDG?
The Gateway can process upto 250 messages per second with a response time of 3 seconds totaling to 2,16,00,000 messages per day. NSDG is scalable to achieve a throughput of 1000 messages per second with a response time of 3 seconds totaling to 8,64,00,000 messages per day.
