Security and authentication are critical features for systems implementing international social security agreements. First, given the interorganizational and cross-border nature of these systems, institutions have to apply security and data protection policies and regulations. Second, the ICT-based implementation has to provide the means to validate the authenticity of the operations and to replace the handwritten signature.
The institution, in coordination with other participants in the agreement, implements interoperable services in accordance with the institutional model of interoperability for the implementation of international agreements.
The implementation of international agreements involves the development of a service-oriented architecture and includes the development and implementation of a set of services. These services must be properly orchestrated within a business processes model adequate to carry out the processes described in international agreements.
The institution, in coordination with the other participants in the agreement, defines semantic interoperability resources at the international level in order to improve the automatization of data exchange operations among institutions involved in the agreement.
Using semantic interoperability in the implementation of international agreements would provide unambiguous definitions of the concepts used by the institutions involved. These mechanisms would be mainly based on metadata systems and vocabularies related to the exchanged data types.
The institution, in coordination with the others participating in the agreement, establishes an interoperability framework to implement international agreements.
Interoperability techniques enable the connection of the systems of different institutions, particularly at the international level; they are therefore among the essential technologies for implementing international social security agreements. The specific guidelines in this section are:
The institution defines an institutional architecture specifying the mechanisms to perform an effective and secure interaction between the institution’s systems and those at the national and international levels.
If several national institutions participate in the agreement, they define an architecture covering national exchanges.
The national architecture focuses on the coordination between the liaison agency and the competent institutions in the country, enabling exchanges with cross-border institutions through the international architecture.
The institution, in coordination with the other institutions participating in the agreement, defines an architecture enabling it to perform international data exchanges in an efficient and secure way.
In the case of multilateral agreements, the international architecture may include a “trusted third organization” storing key common information, such as a log of transactions, digital signatures and certificates.
This section addresses the definition of architectures, specifying the main ICT components that enable the implementation of interaction between institutions putting into practice international social security agreements.
The implementation of agreements involves three architectures:
The institution defines administrative principles to manage the main operations and resources of the international agreement.
The main operations include data exchanges based on requests/responses, notifications of changes and relevant information about persons covered by the agreement. The main resources comprise information models of the data exchanged, digital certificates and signatures, and the software systems to be used for the implementation.
