UK Access Management Federation reaches 1,500 entities

The UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research continues its sustained growth, and by the end of 2012 the number of registered entities in the federation reached 1,500. It continues to be the largest federation for research and education in the world. (At the time of writing, there are 933 members and 1,518 registered entities.)

The UK federation’s membership consists of identity providers (IdPs) at HE and FE institutions and in the schools sector, and service providers (SPs) offering a range of online services from academic research journals to literacy materials for schools, and from video archives to mapping data.

The technology underlying the UK federation is Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). For IdPs, SAML federations allow authentication and authorisation information to be asserted while protecting the privacy of their users, and SAML software can be integrated with existing technologies such as wikis and virtual learning environments. SPs can integrate SAML software to benefit from reduced processing of personal data and accurate implementation of license conditions.

Much of the sustained growth in the size of the UK federation has come from SPs, and the 1,500th entity registered in the UK federation was an SP registered by TechEthika.

New developments within the UK federation include further development of the RAPTOR authentication statistics reporting tool. To find out more about this and other developments in access and identity management, please look at the relevant pages of the UK federation website:

• www.ukfederation.org.uk