Swiss universities and SWITCH receive an award for AAI

EDUCAUSE 2009 Catalyst Award

In early November 2009, SWITCH was presented with the EDUCAUSE 2009 Catalyst Award in Denver, Colorado – also on behalf of the Swiss universities. The Catalyst Award is one of the most important awards worldwide for ICT innovations in the research and education sector. This year, it was presented in recognition of the key role of the "Federated Identity Management System".

SWITCH received the award for its AAI Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure, which is celebrating its 10-year anniversary. SWITCH has designed and built up this infrastructure in close cooperation with the Swiss universities. Previously, students had to log on with a bunch of user names and passwords if they wished to use services of other universities. Thanks to AAI, it is enough to have just a single login today. Alongside SWITCH, the equivalent infrastructures in Great Britain and the USA also received this award.

A delighted Thomas Lenggenhager, who has been working on AAI right from the very start, explains: "AAI has considerably strengthened Switzerland as a research location over the past ten years and made a key contribution towards networking the universities. It is the leading national authentication and authorisation infrastructure in the higher education sector and is now available at all the Swiss universities." AAI is also revolutionising the relationship between the education sector and commercial suppliers – thanks to AAI, employees and students have access to e-Learning platforms, they can call up a growing number of external services, such as scientific journals, and benefit from special hardware and software offers.

AAI has also succeeded in achieving a breakthrough internationally: comparable structures are being built up and further developed worldwide. Like SWITCH AAI, they use SAML technology and, in most cases, the Shibboleth open source software developed by Internet2.

Background
Ten years ago, SWITCH applied for a mandate from the "Swiss Virtual Campus" (SVC) aimed at the evaluation of authentication and authorisation infrastructure (AAI). It had to be possible for all the different organisations to use the courses promoted by the SVC.

In the course of the past ten years, a highly versatile and reliable infrastructure has developed out of this idea. The pioneering role that SWITCH assumed in building up the AAI in cooperation with the Swiss university community has also achieved international recognition. The concept has been adopted in a large number of countries. The implementation of the AAI concept in Switzerland was supported by subsidies from the Confederation.

Please also take a look at the article entitled "10 years of AAI" in our customer magazine, SWITCH Journal.

 

• http://www.switch.ch/aai
• http://www.educause.edu
• http://www.switch.ch/about/news/journal/