Case Studies

Biometric Identity

Biometric identity provides effortless and highly accurate biometric identification and verification. Biometric systems provide secure access to both physical locations as well as digital systems. With the global demand for security, these systems become the new standard for access control and many other aspects of traditional business.

Biometric authentication

Biometrics authentication (or realistic authentication) is used in computer science as a form of identification and access control. It is also used to identify individuals in groups that are under surveillance.

More traditional means of access control include token-based identification systems, such as a driver’s license or passport, and knowledge-based identification systems, such as a password or personal identification number. Since biometric identifiers are unique to individuals, they are more reliable in verifying identity than token and knowledge-based methods - Wikipedia

The challenge

Tratif cooperated with a Silicon Valley-based company that develops top-level biometric identity hardware and embedded software. Their produces are used worldwide for secure and seamless travel, public safety, commerce and other areas.

The company had established products such as biometric scanners and needed a partner who would build a server-side software from scratch. Due to the nature of biometric data, the key aspects of such system included security and privacy. The system also needed to provide a deep insight into the data to provide auditing and analytics.

Our client builds solutions for multiple end-customers from high variety of business domains, differing in specific requirements (such as type of collected data, language, data processing workflows). Some clients required custom integrations with the pre-existing systems.

Tratif managed to deliver scalable solution on a very short notice. It was developed in an agile way in rapid iterations. While addressing end-customer needs, we managed to build a solid and extensible product. Thanks to high configurability our client was able to sell it to more and more customers.

Biometric industry was very conservative in terms of deployments, so initially the system was deployed only on-premises. At some point the industry opened for the software-as-a-service model. The challenge was to make the existing system a Cloud-based multi-tenant solution that scaled.

Our approach

To keep the data secure, the security by design and privacy by design principles were followed from the very beginning of development.

We focused on separating the core business logic from customer-specific customizations. The goal was to maintain a single codebase and make the product highly configurable. We prepared a component-oriented architecture that allowed easy integration with pre-existing and new systems through a coherent REST API. This approach let our client deliver additional professional services related with system integration and delivering custom solutions that brought biometric identification to the customer’s business domain.

We applied infrastructure as code approach to automate provisioning and deployment. This enabled the client to easily install the software in both customer data centers and cloud

Architectural patterns and tools such as event sourcing, horizontal scaling were applied to fulfill the performance requirements. We integrated monitoring systems for analysis and automatic scalability.

We gradually prepared the system for the new Cloud-native deployments and modern ecosystems such as Kubernetes. Gradual approach allowed our client to continue their previous cooperations without disruptions and at the same time prepare for the new business model.