Identity Management

Leading change across distributed IT service providers requires extensive engagement. Implementing identity and access management (IAM) changes requires involvement of a broad spectrum of constituents. Using techniques developed during ERP and other large-scale change initiatives, we engage the university community in developing requirements and architecture for successful IAM changes.

This presentation will describe the identity management infrastructure of the UAB grid computing project, known as UABgrid. Its development is based on accomplishments of two NSF middleware projects at UAB, which focused on building NMI-enabled, open source tools for support of collaboration within virtual organizations that span institutional boundaries, are autonomous, and are collections of attributes. The middleware solution is known as myVocs and uses Shibboleth for identity management and attribution distribution, Globus for distributed computations, and GridShib to bind Shibboleth and Globus. UABgrid is now expanding its grid computing components to include metascheduling of jobs across multiple HPC clusters across the Internet.

Stanford University's registrar and IT strategist discuss their vision of the future of identity management in higher education. Tom Black and Bruce Vincent will give some progressive perspectives on how their roles complement each other in supporting not only admissions processes but a lifelong relationship between students and universities.

Successful IT infrastructures and architectures are expected to nimbly provide the context for protecting and sharing information and identities. In today's world, new legislation, expectations from faculty and students, and managing risk several times a second are all threats to keeping current services relevant and time to market for new services reasonable. Understanding the importance and nature of the intersection created by security, identity, and policy is vital to planning the future of our infrastructures and architectures.

Security staff want to keep the bad guys out, and identity management (IdM) staff want to let the good guys in. This session will explore this generalization and how to bridge issues in technology, policy, process, and reporting structures relating to security and IdM to achieve shared institutional goals.

MCommunity is a new enterprise directory and identity management system under development at the University of Michigan, a large, decentralized institution. MCommunity will provide a central infrastructure that can be used not only for central IT service provisioning but also for service provisioning within units. Planning for and development of MCommunity is a collaborative effort across both U-M IT units and the many units that will use the new system.

MCommunity will allow the university to know who is and is not a member of the U-M community, enabling central university offices as well as departments, schools, colleges, and campuses to grant and remove access to online resources as needed and appropriate. It will provide identity management, roles management, data sharing and reconciliation, and directory services for U-M. MCommunity will bring together data from multiple institutional sources and will organize, present, and secure the data in a way that is particularly well suited to managing access to university resources.

On behalf of several higher education associations, the American Council on Education submitted comments on the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act

Comments of the EDUCAUSE/Internet2 Computer and Network Security Task Force on the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act; Proposed Rule, Federal Register, Vol. 73, No. 57, U.S. Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development