Dubai Naturalisation and Residency Department (DNRD) have announced that the online application procedures which faced a slowdown during the New Year holiday are now fully operational. System analysts from Oracle and engineers from DNRD have fixed the bugs on Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) application server on which some of DNRD’s online procedures reside. The debugging of the application server was delayed due to the extended New Year holidays.
Contrary to reports that appeared in certain sections of the media, all of DNRD’s manual services were operating normally and the department had bolstered up its over-the-counter services which processed 20,524 visa applications from January 1-3, 2006. DNRD’s online service during the same period processed 5,717 applications. In December 2005, DNRD had processed 239,713 online and 309,217 over-the-counter visa related applications.
Over the past week, DNRD was migrating its online procedures to the new RAC based engine, to add newly devised services to its customers and had rolled back its online services to the back up systems during the operation. DNRD’s new services that are currently available enables the users to scan and attach all the documents required for visa and residency formalities along with the online application form.
More than 10,000 companies and entities are registered to use DNRD’s online system, which at its peak usage logs over 100,000 users transacting in various visa and residency related procedures. DNRD’s IT infrastructure, based on IBM hardware and Oracle software solutions, is robust and highly scalable and has in place several mechanisms for mitigating data and service latency and load factor distribution. DNRD’s customer centric remit ensure that all its customers and users are provided with advance notice regarding service scale downs related to system maintenance, upgradation or migration.
Dubai Naturalisation and Residency Department (DNRD), was established in 1971. It consists of 12 Sections, six of which are main sections located within the premises of the administration, namely: Naturalization and Passports Section, Entry Permits Section, Residency Section, Investigation and Control Section, Administration and Finance Section and Information Technology Section. The other six sections are spread over Dubai and neighbouring area and include Dubai Airport passports Section, Rashid Port Passports Section, Shindagha Port Passports Section, Hamriyah port Passports Section, Jebel Ali Port Passports Section and Hatta Passports Section.
DNRD has recently installed a fast-track electronic passport control system at the Dubai International Airport, eGate that offers card-operated access to the airport to travellers through pre-registration. eGate helps passengers complete passport control within a few seconds, using an electronically operated foolproof fingerprint identification system. Dubai Airport is the first airport in the Middle East and the third in the world to install such an advanced passenger clearance system.
