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- Joining a federation is a lot of effort (policies and contracts)
- Implementing SAML and doing federation is not easy and requires expertise seldom available within Service Providers
- Interfederation is even harder, especially as this, even with using eduGAIN, still means dealing with federations on a National level.
- Setting up federation introduces upfront cost, while no customers are served yet. As a result, for many smaller service providers this barrier is too high, and they decide not to engage with federated identity at all.
- Federation is a lot of work for the service provider, while the service only needs the Affiliation, which is pretty low risk in the data protection spectrum
The InAcademia service aims to radically simplify the ability of Services to validate the users affiliation affiliation.
Customer Experience
Students and staff like services that provide discounts or other benefits. To allow services to provide discounts it must be possible to verify student and staff affiliation in a trustworthy way. The current mechanisms for validating affiliation either involve human checking of affiliation, for example by showing a student card, or make use of exiting identity management systems from institutions. The physical validation does not work will for digital services. Validating affiliation using exiting Identity infrastructures works, and has the benefit or reusing exiting AAI infrastructure. However for services, the initial setup and operational cost for this solution is high. This creates such a barrier for entry that many services choose not to engage with Identity federation at all.
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Service providers to install and manage a fully fledged eduGAIN-enabled SAML environment
Engagement
Surveys with users will be conducted from Y2 on (2016) to assess and monitor user satisfaction. The target indicated in the service KPI is: “95% of users reporting the service is meeting or exceeding the requirements”
KPIs
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