Why connect your services?

The AAF is a collaboration enabler for your own services, efficiently allowing you to provide access to these services to trusted individuals from other member organisations. Connecting your services to the AAF provides the following benefits to your services, allowing you freedom and flexibility.

Trust: Using the AAF allows you to get the level of trust you need in the identity or the authentication of users to your service, without having to undertake the processes of issuing credentials yourself. As the service provider, you decide what level of assurance you need.

Efficiency: The AAF lets you re-use the trusted user registration processes that AAF Identity Providers already manage. This means users won’t need to undergo another lengthy enrolment process and will be able to access your service straight away.

Scalability: Because you don’t need to spend the effort issuing credentials, your service will be much easier to scale to a larger user group if this is what you intend.

Usability: Users will be more likely to use your service because they will remember their username and password.

It’s not all-or-nothing: You can use the AAF in tandem with other authentication services.

Before deciding to connect your service to the Federation, consider the following:

• Identify your need for collaboration? eg jointly funded project, access to equipment etc.
• Consider who you collaborate with? Are they also part of the AAF? eg internal only, local universities, remote universities, government departments, companies etc.
• Determine what you collaborate about – eg large shared data sets, working documents, experiments and experimental tools etc.
• Determine when you collaborate – phases of the research work.
• Assess how you currently collaborate? Can this be improved via the AAF?

What makes a good Candidate Service?

The following checklist will help you determine whether your service is a good candidate for inclusion in the Federation

• Web-based service – other protocols are coming in future but are not yet available
• Some restrictions on access – the service is not open to the general public
• Most of the user base belong to Australian or New Zealand universities or research institutions (some can be from outside this area)
• The number of users may grow beyond a small, manageable group who are personally known to you
• The intended users would prefer not to have an additional username and password to remember

To find out more about becoming a member of the federation, connecting your services or accessing the federation please contact us.