About the AAF
Established in 2009, the Australian Access Federation (AAF) is Australia’s identity federation and part of a global network of over 80 federations around the world. The AAF is a vital part of the Australian eResearch infrastructure landscape enabling safe and secure exchange of information between education and research institutions both locally and internationally.
The Federation is a combination of technology and policy, which offers a trust framework. It provides subscribers with a national single sign-on that allows individuals across many different organisations to collaborate and access online resources within a trusted environment.
By logging in via the AAF, end users can access a variety of services including file transfer, data storage, compute, collaboration tools and portals, scientific instrumentation, administrative systems, scholarly resources and teaching, learning and research resources.
Managing federated access
AAF lowers the costs and effort associated with federated identity management in each individual subscriber organisation. It also removes inter-organisational barriers to collaboration by enabling people to quickly and easily connect with electronic resources. Resource providers are also able to quickly and easily connect their services to over 1 million people connected to the AAF today.
Operating as a shared service, the growing AAF subscriber base encompasses many leading organisations in the research and education sector, these include:
- all Australian Universities
- CSIRO and other government research agencies as well as leading research support organisations
- organisations providing online products or services for teaching, learning and research.
