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.

AAF's Strategic Goals

Our Goal

We are transforming Australia’s research, teaching and learning communities by delivering innovative solutions that provide secure access to high-value digital resources and infrastructure.

Our Guiding Principles

Our trust and identity solutions are co-designed by a nationally engaged expert team using international best practice. Our services are underpinned by sustainable business operations.

Testimonials

``For Macquarie, AAF’s Rapid IdP product positively changed the way the organisation operates. With the Rapid IdP application, system admins can now spend more time on other business value initiatives.``
Grant Sayer
Director of Infrastructure and Applications — Macquarie University
``The eduGAIN connection, provided by the AAF, is a vital service for an international collaboration like the MWA, making it simple for our team of global researchers to access data from the telescope.``
Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt
Director — Curtin Institute for Computation & Director — Murchison Widefield Array
``A primary consideration for AURIN is FAIR data access in a safe and secure manner for its research community. This requires high-quality trusted security solutions, like the AAF to be in place.``
Professor Stuart Barr
Director — AURIN (Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network)
``Pawsey is grateful for the opportunity to work with the AAF, developing new capabilities in Trust and Identity in Australia for High Performance Computing (HPC) Systems. Pawsey is leveraging the expertise of the AAF and our knowledge of the underlying technical HPC functionality to prototype and build the service integrations that will make this all possible.``
Mark Gray
Head of Strategic Partnerships — Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre
``One of our greatest challenges, is to connect and report on the impact our of distributed services. Through this Trust and Identity Pathfinder incubator, we are partnering with the AAF to investigate the tracking of our infrastructure through PIDs at The University of Queensland, UNSW Sydney, Monash University and the University of Adelaide.``
Dr Lisa Yen
Chief Executive Officer — Microscopy Australia