The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is planning to transition its extensive biometric identity management system, which includes around 262 million biometric data points, to the cloud.

“As a program within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM) supports DHS’s mission to protect our nation by providing biometric and biographic identification services to federal, state, and local government decision makers to help them accurately identify the people they encounter and determine whether those people pose a risk to the United States,” the Office of Biometric Identity Management said in a request for information.

The agency aims to transition from IDENT, DHS’s current biometric information storage system, to the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) program. It is working with the Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM) to implement this upgrade, which will move from hardware-based matching to a cloud-based microservice architecture.

DHS seeks inputs from academia, science, technology, engineering, and industry to enhance current and future technical and operational biometric outcomes.