Education and research sectors prepare for access management transition
Today nearly 500 institutions and organisations will complete the transition to a new open standard SAML compliant access management system and the UK Access Management Federation. The federation will be providing access to approximately 8 million users across the UK.
In the past three months, membership of the Access Management Federation has risen dramatically as educational institutions and service providers move to take advantage of the numerous benefits of joining. These include improved services to users, easier compliance with regulatory requirements, reduced support requirements and improved data security. Over 90% of HE institutions and more than half of further education providers have joined the Federation.
The Federation is operated by JANET (UK) on behalf of Jisc and Becta and brings the entire UK education and research sector a step closer to achieving single sign-on to network and online resources. The Federation now has over 150 Service Provider platforms registered with over 100 educational publishers such as the BBC, Elsevier, ProQuest, Thomson Scientific, Institute of Physics and a range of smaller publishers, such as Rock's Backpages.
The access management transition programme, which has supported the first major change in access management for the education and research sectors in ten years, has seen nearly 500 organisations become members of the Federation with over 150 resources made available. “The UK now is unique in having a coherent access management structure stretching across the full educational range.”
During the last two years the programme fostered a now well-established community of practice to share knowledge and take the sector forward, established a centre of expertise at EDINA and has placed the UK at the forefront of international developments in this field.
Essential elements in successful embedding of access management expertise have been the provision by Jisc of 120 free training places at Netskills, outputs from early adopter projects, the deployment of access management solutions for 12 publishers and service providers, the deployment of software for 40 smaller colleges and the detailed review of over 200 resource lists from institutions. In the future JANET UK and Netskills will continue to develop training courses with Netskills delivering ones focused on Service Provider requirements this September.
Nicole Harris, senior services manager at Jisc, said: “The transition programme has pursued a joined up approach taken over the last two years, with support from Becta, JANET, Edina, Jisc RSC’s, third party providers and publishers together with HE and FE institutions. It has given institutions the means by which to make an evolved choice about access management strategy and make full use of the advantages of access management through the UK Federation.
“The UK now is unique in having a coherent access management structure stretching across the full educational range.”
For further information on the Access Management Federation