Gateway Access: Comments and Clarifications
Posted by admin on May 16th, 2007
One of the unique issues facing the UK adoption of the SAML standard through the UK Access Management Federation is to ensure that the UK education community continues to be able to access Athens resources. To support this requirement, JISC has funded Eduserv to develop and maintain two gateways to the UK federation. These gateways are known as the Federation Gateway Services.
These Gateways are currently funded until July 2008, in line with the funding for the UK federation. Funding profiles have been agreed until July 2011 for both services and contracts will be put in place following the May round of JISC Committee meetings. It is worth highlighting that no JISC core funding has currently been contractually agreed post July 2008. This is typical practice as we have to wait for our grants from the funding councils to be confirmed.
We will continue to monitor future funding requirements beyond July 2011 in line with the JISC Services Strategy. JISC will continue to work with Eduserv on developing and enhancing the Gateway services and to ensuring that institutions adopting alternative SAML-compliant technologies such as Shibboleth will continue to be able to access Athens-protected resources at no extra cost to the institution.
The gateways allow:
- An institution using a SAML compliant technology such as Shibboleth to access Athens protected resources.
- An institution using Athens to access federated resources through the UK federation. To enable this functionality, an institution must join the UK federation and declare that they wish to use Eduserv as their ‘outsourced identity provider’.
More information can be found on the Athens website and the UK federation website. Please note that institutions wishing to use the Athens - Shibboleth gateway will still be required to pay a subscription charge to Eduserv for direct Athens functionality - that is Athens acting on the behalf of the institution as an Identity Provider. Charging models can be viewed here.
There are no subscription costs for institutions adopting Shibboleth and using the Shibboleth-Athens Gateway.
If anyone has any concerns about use of these gateways please contact Nicole.