The Dutch Land Registry (Kadaster) is a governmental division that has been responsible since 1832 for the systematic registration of real estate and mortgage information for land, aircraft and ships in the Netherlands. In 1994, Kadaster became a Non-Departmental Public Body (NDPB), a legal entity under public law that carries out its tasks independently and renders account to the Minister of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment. Kadaster currently has about 2,250 employees in 15 subsidiaries and is headquartered in Apeldoorn.

The Challenge: Restructure the Organization and IT to Build a Dynamic Business

Clients of the Kadaster include the government, municipal authorities, water boards and mortgage providers. After its partial privatization in 1994, the Kadaster needed to focus on the open market, such as notary practices and real estate agents, because the private sector is requiring more and more services. “We needed to build the business around our customers that increasingly need property and mortgage information. Traditionally, our goal has been to concentrate on adhering to the legal issues surrounding property registration. Now the customer becomes our primary focus,” said Jan Speksnijder, IT architect. “We needed to restructure our organization and IT technology to become much more flexible and build a dynamic business. The Kadaster was seeking technology that could modernize, centralize and consolidate applications, and reduce complexity for end users when accessing these applications locally and from remote locations. The Citrix solution became an important part of this technology.”

Implementing a Citrix Application Delivery Infrastructure Solution

During the consolidation process that started in 1994 and is still ongoing, subsidiaries were closed and centralized, system administration and datacenters were centralized, and the system workload was consolidated. “We are an information-intensive organization and depend on IT,” said Speksnijder. “We believed that an open, interoperable environment would give us the flexibility to adapt systems quickly and effectively to meet changing customer needs, and introduce new types of services such as building management and cable and wire management.”

Kadaster found a solution for reducing IT complexity and centralizing applications, access and security with Citrix, and implemented the new Citrix components in three phases. In 2000, the agency started migrating completely to virtualized applications and virtualized desktops with Citrix Presentation Server™ — now running on Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 — used respectively on HP ThinPCs and HP thin clients. The servers are allocated in two locations to improve the continuity of application availability in case of emergencies. Later, Citrix Access Gateway™, Advanced Edition was added to the Kadaster´s infrastructure — extended with authentication tokens for additional security — to enable secure, remote access to all applications over the Web.

The latest addition was the introduction of Citrix Password Manager™ for all employees to simplify logging on to password-protected applications, which completed the full implementation.

Complexity Reduction and Cost Control

Citrix Presentation Server now is a crucial part of the IT infrastructure. It enables the Kadaster to be very flexible and dynamic in the administration and renewal of applications because management is centralized on the server instead of being performed on the local desktop. The overall concentration and centralization program has been completed, and the Kadaster now has only organization-wide applications and computer systems, all of which are installed on Presentation Server and delivered to users over the network — even the graphically intensive GIS applications. The organization has many in-house-developed client/server applications that are now much easier to maintain and upgrade. In addition, the system has the adaptability, scalability, availability and performance to handle growing business requirements.

“Reduction in complexity is saving Kadaster 3.5 million euros yearly despite having grown and introduced new services,” added Speksnijder. “A substantial part of the savings results from the Citrix solution, as the architecture would not have been possible without it.”

Secure, Remote Access from Anywhere

Citrix Access Gateway, Advanced Edition gives employees secure, remote access to applications running in the Citrix Presentation Server environment via any Web browser. For example, land surveyors in the field can remotely access GIS applications and information rapidly and securely, which was previously not possible. In addition, working from home or from desktops at municipals has become just as easy and secure as working in the office, even on desktops that are not controlled by the Kadaster. All employees have remote access, with each person’s authorization to access specific resources based on their role. Actions that a user can take when accessing an application are centrally managed by IT staff using Access Gateway. The combination of Access Gateway and Presentation Server lowers costs, brings location independence into the infrastructure, enables the central management of applications and makes maintaining applications easy.

Ending the User Burden of Maintaining Many Passwords

During its infrastructure renewal process, Kadaster introduced a generic authorization architecture based on identity management. This architecture offers a solution for centralizing and standardizing administration of authorization data. The data is maintained in a central directory service and synchronized to miscellaneous systems and applications like Microsoft® Exchange.

“One of the loose ends was that each user still had to log on to each of the different systems and applications, and had many passwords to remember and maintain. We still use heterogeneous systems based on Windows, OpenVMS and UNIX, and still have some legacy systems running on mainframes. Many applications running on these platforms, as well as Web-based applications, have their own security policy, which forces the user to change passwords on a regular basis and forces the use of strong passwords,” continued Speksnijder. “End users were complaining for years about the number of passwords they had to remember and manage. Reducing the number of passwords was on the wish list in all internal customer satisfaction surveys from 2003.”

“Now, Password Manager hides all application passwords for the users and takes care of logging on and changing passwords in all applications when the security policy of that application asks for it. The user now just has to remember one password. Password Manager automatically creates strong passwords, and thus complies with the security policy of the Kadaster.” concluded Speksnijder.

Future Plans

Kadaster plans to integrate Web Interface for Citrix® Presentation Server with the organization’s Web portal. In addition, VoIP software running on Citrix Presentation Server will be added for remotely connected employees.

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