Liberia Social Safety Nets Project turns to OCI for safety net delivery system

Funded by the World Bank, Liberia Social Safety Nets Project (LSSNP) is a government-run organization that provides income support for poor households in the Republic of Liberia.

LSSNP uses three core systems to identify beneficiaries and households in need of financial assistance. The Social Registry Information System (SRIS) is a repository of survey records and households’ social information. The organization’s management information system helps people enroll in different social programs. The SRIS mobile application conducts surveys within communities.

Because the organization was running its applications with on-premises infrastructure, it could no longer support the growth and scale of the initiatives. This led LSSNP to look for a cloud-based solution with on-demand scalability that would increase the processing speed for its core applications.

After already collecting the personally identifiable information of 300,000 households, LSSNP needed a solution with comprehensive security features that would enable it to safeguard sensitive data and manage user access across its applications. This would also ease compliance with data privacy regulations such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.

Because the LSSNP used several third-party applications to collect data, this limited its ability to maintain data integrity. To remove manual and time-consuming data synchronization processes, the organization sought a solution that would allow data to easily integrate into its management information system.

After evaluating several cloud service providers, including Azure, AWS, and Kamatera, LSSNP selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) because it offered the security, performance, and scalability needed to support and migrate core applications.

The organization also valued Oracle’s technical expertise and pay-per-use pricing model, which were necessary to decrease total cost of ownership. Additionally, compliance with international data privacy regulations, such as GDPR, was a critical aspect that contributed to LSSNP’s decision to use Oracle technology.

LSSNP decommissioned its on-premises services and migrated it core applications to OCI, increasing reliability and performance.

The agility gained from OCI’s on-demand scalability enabled the organization to easily provision virtual machines with sufficient computing capacity to support its applications and expansion plans. After migrating to OCI, LSSNP saw 80% faster development, testing, and deployment of new features. It also helped remove the burden from IT specialists who now focus on improving daily operations.

Using OCI Object Storage, LSSNP now securely stores the sensitive data of 300,000 households using 256-bit AES encryption, allowing the organization to maintain compliance with data security regulations.

Liberia Social Safety Nets Project taps the low latency and high volume of queries powered by OCI Block Volume to support the geographical expansion of its Social Registry Information System—which also acts as a household database—to nine other local counties. As a result, LSSNP efficiently manages data collected from its applications, providing in-depth insights into the eligibility of households.

Using OCI Block Volume, LSSNP also stores multiple copies of data across OCI storage servers in Oracle’s Johannesburg data center, with built-in repair mechanisms for increased uptime. OCI enabled the organization to define its backup policy and perform automated, scheduled backups to strengthen its disaster recovery strategy.

With OCI Flexible Load Balancing, the government entity automatically routes internet traffic across multiple fault domains to ensure high availability of resource-demanding applications. By applying and reinforcing OCI Web Application Firewall protection for both private and public instances, the organization protects its internet-facing web portal and application workloads.

In addition, LSSNP uses OCI Identity and Access Management to define user access and entitlements for aid agencies that use its core applications, which helps decrease the risk of a data breach.

LSSNP enlisted the help of Oracle Cloud Lift Services to migrate its applications to OCI. Oracle assisted throughout the migration process and helped migrate the development, test, and production environments with minimum downtime. The project was completed on time and on budget.