What's in it for me


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Attribute recommendations for AAF participants

The Australian Access Federation will provide the means of allowing a member institution to trust the information it receives from another member so that access to resources and secure communication can be conducted seamlessly, in a way that will support effective collaboration between users. This collaboration will be both between member institutions and also with users in other federations with which the Australian federation will be peered.

This page describes some ways in which the Australian Access Federation will affect members of the research and higher education community.

For researchers, other staff members, and students

If you are a researcher, other staff member, or student at a university or research institution, the AAF will enable you to log in using a single account issued by your own institution, and access a wide range of resources both internal and external to your institution, including:

  • Data collections and data grids;
  • Scientific instruments, modelling and visualisation tools, and computing resources;
  • Collaboration environments and workspaces for virtual teams;
  • Scholarly resources and publications;
  • eLearning resources and learning object collections;
  • National higher education and research administrative systems.

This means:

  • You don't have to request and remember accounts from all of these different resource providers, only the one account from your own institution.
  • You can collaborate more easily with colleagues because it is easier to share access to tools and resources.

For resource providers

If you manage one of the resource types listed above and want to grant access to it to authorised members of the research and higher education community, the AAF will enable you to provide access to your resource or service to authorised users in a secure way without having to issue your own accounts. Institutions and resource providers in the federation agree to abide by the federation policies and to trust the information that each passes to the other. This means you can focus on managing your resource or service and the rules for how it is accessed, rather than on managing user accounts or certificates.

For institutions

Institutions will benefit from the AAF by enabling their research, academic, and administrative users to access a wide range of resources and to collaborate more easily with colleagues in Australia and in other countries with which the AAF has a peering relationship.

Other ways in which institutions may make use of the AAF framework and infrastructure include:

  • AAF membership can be used as a driver for improving institutional identity management practices;
  • Institutions will have the opportunity to use signed server certificates issued through the AAF, providing easier delivery of SSL and eliminating the need to purchase these certificates from commercial providers;
  • The Shibboleth and PKI technologies used with the AAF can be used for other institutional purposes, such as allowing the use of digital signatures on email and electronic documents, or federating access management among services within the university.

There will be a significant amount of work required for an institution to join the AAF; however some aspects can be managed by the AAF if an institution does not wish to manage them internally.