Internet2’s EDIT consortium and Educause have been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation for the ongoing development work on middleware technologies. Today more and more organizations need to verify and manage user identity and access. Middleware solutions that automate changing access rights will become even more important.
The goal is to empower IT administrators, faculty and other campus leaders with the ability to make group membership and resource privilege changes using one consolidated tool, rather than updating each individual application. This improves security and reduces the time needed to manage project groups, both on and off campus.
Collaborators want tools such as shared calendaring, videoconferencing, and wikis that integrate their teaching and research lives and their institutional and inter-institutional worlds
Ken Klingenstein,
Internet2 Sr. Director of Middleware and Security
The grant will enable further development and research on both identity and access management. Internet2 has been developing Shibboleth Single Sign-on. Shibboleth is standards-based, open source middleware software which provides Web Single SignOn across or within organizational boundaries. It allows sites to make informed authorization decisions for individual access of protected online resources in a privacy-preserving manner.
Tags: Internet2, Educause, National Science Foundation, Middleware, network, trends
Verizon’s Business unit joined Internet2 last year and has been working on upgrading their network services unit by scaling their 40GB network to a full 100GB. Scheduled for 2009, their first hops will be in Chicago, New York and Washington DC. Verizon is also converting their rings to optical mesh technology.
Friday afternoon 
