UK Access Management Federation reaches 1500 entities.

Posted on Thursday, 17 January 2013

The UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research continues its sustained growth, and by the end of 2012 the number of registered entities in the federation reached 1500. Having evolved from the SDSS development federation in 2006, the UK federation has grown consistently in the last four years and today has 924 members and 1518 entities. It continues to be the largest federation for research and education.

The UK federation’s membership consists of identity providers (IdPs) at HE and FE institutions and in the schools sector, and service providers (SPs) offering a range of online services from academic research journals to literacy materials for schools, and from video archives to mapping data.

The technology underlying the UK federation is SAML. For identity providers, SAML federations allow authentication and authorization information to be asserted while protecting the privacy of their users, and SAML software can be integrated with existing technologies such as wikis and virtual learning environments. Service providers can integrate SAML software to benefit from reduced processing of personal data and accurate implementation of license conditions.

Much of the sustained growth in the size of the UK federation has come from service providers, and the 1500th entity registered in the UK federation was a service provider registered by TechEthika.

Commenting on the recent decision to become a federation member, TechEthika's Managing Director Rozi Jendrzewski said: "Our online resource booking system 'SiSo' has approximately a million users worldwide within both the education and healthcare sectors. Joining the UK Access Management Federation has opened up another avenue of authentication for our SiSo system and, rather than battling with technology to make the appropriate Active Directory connections, the UK federation makes setting up authentication from a university's IdP an easier process. It also allows us to collect user attribute data. In fact it has streamlined the entire process."

Gary Gray, UK Access Management Federation Service Manager, said: "We're pleased to welcome TechEthika as a new member of the UK federation, and pleased to hear that the experience of starting with the UK federation has been so positive."

"One of the UK federation's core services is metadata registration and publication. However, not every organisation finds it as simple as TechEthika to register and deploy entities within the UK federation, and our helpdesk continues to provide support for new members of the UK federation. We also provide high quality technical support and troubleshooting for existing members of any size" added Gary.

New developments within the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research include further development of the RAPTOR authentication statistics reporting tool. To find out more about this and other developments in access and identity management, please look at the relevant pages of the UK federation website.

Edited by SteveGlover on 08 February 2013, at 02:49 PM