Advice to Service Providers on the Change to the Federation Gateway Services Arrangement
In January 2008 JISC announced a significant change to its transition programme for access management regarding the extension to the Federation Gateway Service contract with Eduserv. Regretfully, JISC were unable to reach an affordable agreement for the provision of that service and JISC stopped funding Athens or the Federation Gateway Service from 1 August 2008.
Many institutions have already decided or are in the process of deciding to join the UK federation and adopt SAML-compliant software. An overwhelming majority of UK Access Management Federation members have chosen an open source solution. Following the JISC announcement a large number of institutions reviewed their current access management strategy and took more urgent steps to implement SAML-compliant software (either commercial or open source) by 31 July 2008.
JISC gave the following advice to service providers, following their announcement in January 2008:
- It will be important for UK institutions to know which access management solution(s) your organisation will be providing from 1 August 2008 eg. IP address, IP-proxy, userID and password, Athens, Shibboleth. We therefore ask you to confirm these with us as soon as possible.
- If your organisation is providing a ‘live’ service via the UK federation, savings can be made by contacting subscribed institutions and ask them to confirm if they are Shibboleth-enabled so that your organisation does not have to continue paying for sites that are no longer using the Athens service.
- If there are subscribing institutions that have expressed concerns to you regarding the recent change to the transition programme or have not yet made a decision about moving to SAML-compliant software, please ask them to contact the JISC help line 020 3006 6035 or email jisc-access-management@jisc.ac.uk.
- If your organisation has not yet made a decision about joining the UK federation or implementing SAML-compliant software for access management we recommend you start making steps towards this as soon as possible.
JISC have been gathering information about service provider and UK further and higher institutions’ status regarding membership of the UK federation and their compliance with federated access management technologies. A list of these organisations and their current status can be found on the JISC Access Management Team blog
These lists will be updated as new information comes through.
If you would like to discuss the implications of this change to the transition programme, please contact the JISC Access Management Outreach Team jisc-access-management@jiscmail.ac.uk