Federations: The New Infrastructure

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Today’s Agenda

• Just like our faculty and staff members, institutions have partners• State and local• National• International

• Increasingly want to share and use online resources

• How can we do this efficiently and securely?

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Campus Partners and Collaborators

One institution hosting course-content for others

Libraries purchasing licenses from multiple vendors with specific access policies

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Research Partners and Collaborators

Making resources available to project members at other schools

Single sign-on across campus online services and national/international Grid environments

GridShib

Great Plains Network

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How can an institution support all these online relationships in an efficient and

secure way?

Federations

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What is a Federation?

•  An association of organizations that come together to exchange information as appropriate about their users and resources in order to enable collaborations and transactions.

• Uses coordinated policy, technology, and business practices to establish baseline on which to exchange identity information

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Value of Membership

Leverage campus identity infrastructure to enable single sign-on access to externally managed resources for • Academic, • Research,• Government, and• Business relationships

Enable collaboration with all these partners by joining one national R&E federation

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Value of Membership

Saves• Time and money

Increases • Security and Privacy• Opportunities

Connects to international partners• Federations in process or production in

Australia, Finland, France, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, UK

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BeforeFederations

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AfterFederations

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Becoming a Member

Get the institution’s Identity Management Infrastructure in shape• Identification• Authentication• Authorization• Accountability

Involves technology, policy, and processes

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Join the US R&E Federation

InCommon • Uses identity-exchange standards• Low policy, process, and technology

requirements

Evolving membership requirements• Increased value of protected resources

means higher-level of identity confidence for institutions accessing those resources

http://incommonfederation.org

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Encourage Partners to Join

One infrastructure services institutions and partners• Keeps the identity data with the institution• Requires fewer repositories of identity

information• Reduces the potential of identity spills

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Encourage Partners to Join

• Federation enables communities to share information about individuals’ identity, reducing the overall work required to maintain connections and reduce the friction in cross-community interactions.

• Burton Group, Federating a Distributed World: Asserting Next-Generation Identity Standards

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Transitions

When should you start?• When will you feel the pain?

What’s available to help?• Workshops• Practice documents• Roadmaps with policy and technology

milestones• Emerging community• Open software and technologies

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Food for Thought…

• How many partnerships, access licenses, and collaborative relationships does your institution have?

• How much time are you spending managing access to each one and at what risk?

• Do you want to address these in the same way and save time and risk…..

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…for Your Partners

As more and more companies in industry segments (such as outsourced employee benefits) start using federated identities, early adopters will often find competitive advantages while those who are late to the table scramble to catch up.

• Burton Group, Federated Identity

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…for Your Institution

Federations take investment, which is indeed difficult given our tight funding. But as the pressures increase, our institution must have the flexibility to source services creatively and collaborate nationally and internationally to remain successful.

Jerry Campbell,Chief Information Officer and University Librarian University of Southern California