Today, global collaborations rely on students & researchers’ ability to seamlessly access distributed datasets, tools and instruments. The challenge for CIOs is to develop the optimal framework to manage these new demands in a challenging environment of constrained IT budgets. Institutions need to be in a position to deliver service agility to balance the need to efficiently provision the services required by users with the data and service protection requirements mandated by the institution and regulators.

To achieve this, authentication and authorization infrastructures must be at a level of maturity to flexibly respond to changing requirements. Fortunately for Canada’s CIOs, the global digital research infrastructure community has been working on this problem for some time, and the solution, federated identity, can help CIOs future-proof for this new era. Identity federations offer a community of trusted partners who collaboratively build and evolve the trust fabric that binds them, so that participating institutions can trust the information received from other participating institutions. In Canada, this solution is offered by CANARIE through the Canadian Access Federation.

Session attendees will learn about the value of Federation for their users and the ease of deployment in their current IT architecture, and will explore global examples of successful identity federations, including InCommon in the US, where 420 institutions participate in a federation that allows their users to seamlessly access nearly 3,000 services. Attendees will also be invited to join the conversation and discuss their institution’s needs and challenges with this approach, so that we can build a framework that lets Canada’s researchers and students access world-class services.