Key benefits

For researchers, other staff members, and students

If you are a researcher, staff member, or student at a university or research institution, the most immediate benefit is that the AAF will enable you to log in using the credentials issued by your own institution, and seamlessly access a wide range of resources both internal and external to your institution, such as:

• data collections and data grids,
• scientific instruments, modelling and visualisation tools, and computing resources,
• collaboration environments and workspaces for virtual teams,
• scholarly resources and publications,
• eLearning resources and learning object collections, and
• national higher education and research administrative systems.

This means:

• you will only need to remember the one account from your own institution,
• the need to disclose your identity is reduced, and
• collaboration with colleagues is increased because it is easier to share access to tools and resources.

For service providers

If you manage services and resources such as those listed above, the AAF will enable you to provide access to them to authorised users in a secure way without needing to issue individual accounts. Under the AAF, institutions and service providers agree to abide by the Federation policies and to trust the information shared between them.

This means:

• more time to focus on managing your service and the rules for authorising access,
• reduced user support, and
• accurate implementation of licence conditions.

For institutions

Institutions will benefit from the AAF by enabling their research, academic and administrative users to access a wide range of services and resources with confidence and to collaborate more readily with colleagues in Australia and with AAF international peers. As a shared service it minimises the cost and effort for each individual subscriber of managing federated identity by enabling users to use their home institution login.

Other ways in which institutions may make use of the AAF include:

• driving improved institutional identity management practices,
  offering better service to users,
• providing improved access services for cross institutional courses,
• integrating with existing access management systems, and
• reducing identity and access support problems.