Case Study: Angolan Ministry of Justice and Human Rights achieves efficient nationwide ID rollout and secure criminal records with Microsoft Azure

Microsoft technology driving one of Africa’s most successful National ID card rollouts ever

Angola’s Ministry of Justice and Human Rights ran two nationwide projects—a new national ID for 25 million citizens and the full computerization of criminal records—across a vast, 1.2 million km² country. The ministry faced the challenge of managing nearly 900 servers, about 1,000 workstations and 180 remote sites while improving security, patching, and delivering 24x7, highly scalable, zero-downtime services to citizens in remote provinces.

Working with systems integrator DGM Sistemas, the ministry moved to a private-cloud datacenter managed with Microsoft System Center (and Windows Azure Pack/Azure VM management), Active Directory and SQL Server clusters. The new platform enabled centralized monitoring, automated operational routines, daily antivirus/patch deployments and custom dashboards—resulting in faster rollouts, proactive issue detection, significant daily budget savings, timely ID deliveries across all 18 provinces and the issuance of some 3 million criminal-record certificates.

Angolan Ministry of Justice and Human Rights

Nelson Dias

Information Technology Department Director