About the Australian Access Federation
Australia’s trust and identity experts for research and education
Established in 2009, the Australian Access Federation (AAF) operates Australia’s national identity Federation for the higher education and research sector, enabling trusted access to digital resources and services across institutions and international borders.
The Federation enables people from different organisations to securely access online resources and collaborate with confidence, facilitating more than 13 million authentications each year through a trusted combination of technology, policy and governance.
By logging in via the AAF, 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.
A seamless and secure national research ecosystem
AAF is recognised by the Australian Government’s Department of Education as the Trust and Identity Capability, working with the sector to provide trusted access to national research infrastructure. Find out more here >> trust.aaf.edu.au
Australian ORCID Consortium
Nationally and internationally engaged team
Trust and Identity
- Originating via a CAUDIT program of work, the AAF is a member of the The Council of Australasian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT) – the peak body for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the Higher Education and Research sectors.
- AAF is a founding partner of the Australasian Higher Education Cyber Security Service (AHECS) – a multi-skilled group of sector leaders in cybersecurity that include the AAF, AARNet, CAUDIT, AUSCERT and REANZ.
- AAF is a Member Federation of eduGAIN.
- AAF is a partner of the Digital Nexus Alliance (DNA) alongside partners ARDC, AARNet, NCI and Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre.
- AAF is an associate of the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) – AAF’s Head of Support, Terry Smith, chairs the Identity and Access Management (IAM) Working Group.
- AAF is a member of the the Research and Education FEDerations group (REFEDS).
- Members of the AAF team regularly attend AARC TREE (Authentication and Authorisation for Research and Collaboration (AARC) Technical Revision to Enhance Effectiveness (TREE)) meetings.
- Members of the AAF team participate in National Earth and Environmental Sciences Facilities Forum (NEESFF) meetings.
- Members of the AAF team participate in Federated Identity Management for Research (FIM4R) meetings.
Persistent Identifiers
- AAF’s CEO Heath Marks is an ORCID Board Director.
- AAF is a member of the international ORCID Consortia Interest Group
- AAF’s PIDs Engagement and Support Lead, Melroy Almeida, is a Crossref Ambassador
- AAF participates in Research Data Alliance (RDA) interest and working groups
- Members of the AAF team participate in the National PIDs Strategy Stakeholder Action Groups
- AAF’s PIDs Engagement and Support Lead, Melroy Almeida participates in the Identifiers for Instruments Australia (i4iOZ) Community of Practice
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
Contact the AAF
If you would like to discuss trust and identity for your organisation, please contact us.
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