The global WiFi roaming service eduroam is one of the most notable and visible Trust & Identity services developed by the GÉANT community. Supported at European level in the GÉANT Project, eduroam is operated on national and local levels by NRENs and research and education institutions. eduroam is available in tens of thousands of locations across 100+ territories around the world, and used over 4 billion times per year to authenticate students, researchers and staff while they travel for study, work or leisure.
Services
Online services are crucial to research and education. Students, researchers, academics and staff in research and education institutions rely on them for collaboration through e-learning, teaching, conferencing, analysing and sharing data, and for accessing journals and libraries. Trusted digital identities underpinned with secure technologies allow simple and secure access to such content and resources.
GÉANT provides a number of secure services that build trust and support the use of online identities:
The eduGAIN interfederation service connects 70+ identity federations, 4000+ organisations and 3,000+ services around the world, helping nearly 30 million students, researchers and educators to access much needed online resources while minimising the number of accounts they have to manage. eduGAIN has evolved to become a cornerstone in an array of other services and activities, deeply embedded in the Trust and Identity landscape of the GÉANT Project and beyond.
The eduTEAMS service makes managing virtual teams easy. It enables members of the research and education community to create and manage virtual teams, and to securely access and share common resources and services, using federated identities from eduGAIN and trusted identity providers. Offered in different ‘flavours’, eduTEAMS also underpins other GÉANT services such as MyAcademicID IAM, and can be used as the basis for more tailored authentication and authorisation services for research communities, such as high performance computing (HPC) infrastructures. eduTEAMS technology is funded in the GÉANT Project.
InAcademia is the real-time, digital equivalent of asking a student to show their student card so they can access discounts when buying online services and products. Part of the GÉANT Project service portfolio, InAcademia uses the privacy-preserving eduGAIN service to verify student and academic affiliations and provide merchants with a quick, easy, reliable and secure way to sell discounted or dedicated offerings to the student market. Launched early in 2020, InAcademia is available in a growing number of countries and registered more than a million student authentications in 2021.
The MyAcademicID Identity and Access Management (IAM) service provides identity and federated access management for the services of the European Student Card Initiative and the services directly supporting the digitisation of the Erasmus+ programme. The MyAcademicID IAM service is provided by GÉANT using the eduTEAMS service, with funding in the EDSSI project. Launched at the end of 2020, within a year MyAcademicID IAM had supported more than 80,000 students in accessing Erasmus services.