Jisc receives award for federated access management work
Jisc received an international award today for its work in federated access management in the UK at the Educause conference in Denver.
The catalyst award is intended to recognize technology innovation and initiatives that provide groundbreaking solutions to major challenges in higher education, or change prevailing conditions in remarkable ways so as to allow new solutions to be arranged.
Federation Services Manager at Jisc, Nicole Harris, who accepted the award on Jisc’s behalf, said: “The award really shows how far access management has come, with parts of the UK experience considered so embedded that they have become informative history.”
Educause is a not-for-profit organisation whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.
Julie Little, Educause senior director of teaching, learning and professional development, said: “This year the catalyst award recognizes a complex, far-reaching web of initiatives that has had broad impact on higher education and its partners in less than a decade.
The ultimate goal of federated identity systems is to allow users of one domain to securely access data or systems of another domain seamlessly, without the need for them to change their password or do other administrative work.“Although many federal identity management organizations exist, we wish to identify several with this award to represent the field as a whole and acknowledge their work as representative of the many organizations that manage federated identity systems worldwide.”
The ultimate goal of federated identity systems is to allow users of one domain to securely access data or systems of another domain seamlessly, without the need for them to change their password or do other administrative work.
However, there is also a need to protect the user’s privacy, so this has spurred the development of open-source software and work on standards. As a result, a federated approach was adopted by many countries as a basis for advancing their infrastructure to support 21st-century research, education and collaboration.
Earlier this year, Jisc launched new infrastructure to lead the colleges and universities towards more effective access management. To use the new system, institutions and service providers need to join the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research, which is run by JANET(UK) on behalf of Jisc and Becta.
Read about Jisc's work in this area
Read the Access Management team's blog