FIM4R international case studies

Tuakiri operates a common policy and trust fabric for FIM4R and is available to the New Zealand research communities now. Tuakiri provides researchers with unique electronic identity authentication over multiple administrative domains (member institutions) and across national boundaries that can be used together with community defined attributes to authorise access to digital resources and enable research collaboration.

Federated identity management (FIM) in general and federated identity management for research communities (FIM4R) is an arrangement that can be made among multiple organisations that lets subscribers use the same identification data to obtain access to the secured resources of all organisations in the group. Specifically in the various research communities there is an increased interest in a common approach to FIM as there is obviously a large potential for synergies. For groups such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) as a large international research collaborations, FIM services hold the promise of significantly easing the burden of handling identity management within the collaboration. Rather than managing the lifecycle of all the accounts for all the researchers world-wide, FIM would allow more funding to go directly to research rather than infrastructure overhead that duplicates services offered by campuses.

The requirements of FIM are not limited to hard science research groups. Nectar Cloud provides computing infrastructure, software and services that allow Australia’s research community to store, access, and run data remotely, rapidly and autonomously. Nectar Cloud’s self-service structure allows users to access their own data at any time and collaborate with others from their desktop in a fast and efficient way using FIM via Australian Access Federation (AAF). Specifically, the sharing of an authentication infrastructure that in-turn allows the sharing of specific attributes for access control. Controlled access to data with minimally duplicated infrastructure is the premise for FIM value.

By sharing International case studies that communicate the FIM4R value proposition, we believe the New Zealand research community will get an insight and start to develop and converge on a common vision for FIM4R, take back with them the prospect of their institution using FIM4R to deliver on national initiatives for the Science Domain Plan, and support any future crown funded research initiatives.