DEVELOPER TOOLS

Policies, processes and technologies to be explored for secure access

Education and technology leaders in eight states are collaborating with Internet2 to extend advanced trust and identity solutions used at the nations top universities to K-12 and community college students, faculty and staff as part of a set of pilots to help ease access to leading technology solutions.

Participating institutions will be able to use secure electronic credentials issued by their institutions to safely access a wide array of community and commercial educational resources. The nationwide pilots will draw on the experience of Internet2's federated identity and access management framework, InCommon, which has been adopted by more than five hundred universities, research labs and commercial partners throughout the United States.

The pilots will explore the opportunities and challenges in deployment of these federated access solutions on local policies, technical environments, and business processes. It is expected that experiences from these pilots will make easier, more secure, and privacy-preserving methods of accessing protected cloud services available to all participants.

Internet2's InCommon—which already reaches more than 6 million students, faculty, and staff nationwide—also allows for single sign-on capability. This capability will enable an individual at a local K-12 school to access library databases, learning management systems, cloud applications or other participating services as approved by the school without the worry of having to set up each student with individual unmanaged accounts. The institutions participating in the selected K-12 school districts and community college pilots connect to Internet2 through regional networks that also are members of The Quilt.

"The pilots are being conducted in partnership with the advanced regional networks supporting research and education," said George Laskaris, CEO of New Jersey's Higher Education Network, who serves on The Quilt Board of Directors. "Our hope is that this first round of pilots will provide important case studies and best practices that will help build secure trust frameworks for community colleges and K-12 schools as they ramp-up their access to outsourced services."

"It's now common for a faculty member in the course of teaching and scholarship to use their university credentials to access library databases, collaboration tools, data storage sites, and a host of other cloud services and online resources," explained Jack Suess, chair of the Steering Committee for Internet2's InCommon and vice president for information technology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "We hope the Internet2 InCommon-Quilt pilots can begin to bring these same conveniences to the K-12 and community college communities."

The pilot participants, which most are Internet2 Research and Education members and Quilt members, include:

• MCNC (North Carolina)
• Maryland Research and Education Network
• Merit Network, Inc. (Michigan)
• National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) andIlliniCloud, Technical Partners of the Illinois Shared Learning Environment (ISLE)
• Nebraska Educational Service Unit Coordinating Council
• OARnet (Ohio)
• Utah Education Network
• WiscNet (Wisconsin)

 For more information on the pilots, visit: https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/InCQuiltFed/Home