Case Study: National Gendarmerie achieves centralized, real-time cross-referencing of security files with Talend

Simplifying investigations to strengthen French national security

The National Gendarmerie, a 100,000‑person branch of the French armed forces responsible for public safety and national security, needed to cross‑reference hundreds of disparate government and police databases to identify risks around major events (Euro 2016, COP21) and after a wave of terrorist attacks. Manually querying separate files was slow and error‑prone, so the Gendarmerie required a unified, auditable way to run automated checks on identities while respecting legal and privacy constraints.

Using Talend integrated into the Gendarmerie’s Système d’Interfaces et de Référentiels (SIR), the organization centralized and normalized queries across dozens of files and hundreds of applications in real time. The Talend Data Fabric handles data exchange, repositories and access control, processing about 3 TB/day and 600 jobs, scaling screening from 300,000 identities per year to one million per month, and returning results in 1–30 seconds (typically 8–10s), enabling faster investigations, mobile checks, border controls and large‑scale analytics like geo‑localizing patrols.

National Gendarmerie

Christophe Tedesco

Head of National Security Technology and IT Department