ANFSI completes
3-month app migration for 280,000 terminals using MongoDB

THE CHALLENGE

Curbing performance issues and addressing cloud migration difficulties

For a small team, the brief for Agence du Numérique des Forces de Sécurité Intérieure (ANFSI) is big. The agency for France’s internal security forces designs, develops, and secures communication systems for citizens and law enforcement. As such, it manages an ecosystem of data servers, VPNs, mobile device management systems, and application servers, supporting over 280,000 terminals that exchange data like geolocation and configuration updates.

Over the years, ANFSI faced several challenges in managing its communication systems. Initially, the team used an SQL database, but as the number of terminals it manages grew, so did performance issues, particularly latency.

To overcome these limitations, ANFSI turned to MongoDB, recognizing the database’s source-available nature, API compatibility, and scalability as an ideal solution. “With MongoDB, we were able to address our growing data and performance needs effectively,” said Jose Nunes, Secure Mobile Development Expert at ANFSI.

OUR SOLUTION

Three-month migration of critical applications and 2TB of data to MongoDB

Internal delays pushed the migration’s start date to January 2023, leaving just three months for the ANFSI team to meet and aggressive deadline. With limited MongoDB experience, ANFSI engaged MongoDB’s professional services team for customized training on development and operations, including practical exercises and real-world feedback. “It was invaluable,” said Nunes. “And we quickly transitioned to the project phase.”

The team designed a scalable, high-availability architecture using MongoDB Ops Manager which streamlined management, monitoring, and deployment automation while providing robust backup and restoration capabilities. This facilitated rapid deployment of development and production clusters. The MongoDB team also optimized application code, streamlined database schemas to reduce memory usage, and resolved infrastructure bottlenecks.

To ensure resilience, the team conducted a stress test by destroying the production environment. Using scripts and MongoDB Ops manager, they successfully rebuilt ANFSI’s system within 30 minutes, demonstrating its reliability and readiness for operational demands.

OUTCOME

Achieving consolidated performance, data security, and compliance

The migration helped ANFSI achieve significant advancements in data security, compliance, and performance. A key innovation was the MongoDB Queryable Encryption feature which enables sensitive data to be encrypted on the client side while still allowing expressive queries to be performed directly without decrypting the data. This ensures strong protection of personal and health data by encrypting it upon leaving the client application, with queries also encrypted for enhanced privacy and functionality.

To address challenges in its private cloud, ANFSI updated its custom Key Management Interoperability Protocol server, initially reliant on a master key, to manage encrypted data keys directly. This helped the organization achieve compliance with stringent security regulations and strengthened its security architecture. ANFSI is also developing a database-as-a-service platform to simplify managing sensitive data while balancing security and performance.

Reflecting on a project that required innovation and scaling within the constraints of state budgets and tight timelines, Nunes is emphatic: “We are very happy that MongoDB has become one of the standard solutions at ANFSI.”

To learn more visit Ops Manager.