The Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS) has released a new version of their world-renowned data exchange solution: X-Road 7 “Unicorn” provides a better user experience and is more secure, scalable and environmentally friendly than its predecessors.

X-Road is open-source software and ecosystem solution that provides unified and secure data exchange between organisations.

The most significant new features of X-Road 7 are about protecting data at rest. Another important new feature is a production-level Docker support that makes X-Road more scalable and cloud friendly.

“Overall, the new features make X-Road more secure, configurable and scalable. Also, the latest changes enable reducing the environmental footprint of the Security Server”, explains Petteri Kivimäki, CTO of NIIS.

By utilising the new features, users can achieve significant benefits on the ecosystem level. According to Kivimäki, upgrading to version 7.0.0 paves the way for the following releases that will also provide substantial changes and improvements.

”Of course, it’s always recommended to use officially supported X-Road versions only because they receive patches and security fixes. The good news is that X-Road 7 is backwards compatible on the interface level with X-Road 6, so the migration should be smooth”, Kivimäki says.

X-Road is a digital public good verified by the Digital Public Goods Alliance, and it’s released under the MIT open-source license and is available free of charge. The solution is implemented in several countries worldwide, and its global user community has over a thousand members from more than sixty countries.