About the AAF
The AAF is transforming Australia’s research, teaching, and learning communities by delivering innovative technology solutions and policy, that provide secure access to digital resources and infrastructure, across the entire ecosystem.
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.
We enable secure connection and collaboration, between education and research institutions, by providing access to over 990 national and international services that support teaching, learning and research.
As experts in trust and identity, the national identity Federation we operate enables over 10.9M authentications annually. We are continuing to invest in the technological capability of the Federation and our cloud hosted platform now connects more than 80% of our subscribers.
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
The AAF enables seamless access to resources, lowering the effort and costs 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
- national research infrastructures such as Australian Plant Phenomics Network (APPN), AURIN and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC).
- organisations providing online products or services for teaching, learning and research.
We connect people to CERN, CSIRO, NIH (National Institutes of Health), Elsevier, Nectar Research Cloud, Clarivate and many other research services.
AAF is also the ORCID Consortium lead in Australia. ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is an open, non-profit registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs.
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