Welcome to the new IAMOhio web site and to our blog.
IAMOhio is a trusted identity system intended to serve research and computing activities for public and private higher education institutions, K-12, public broadcasting, healthcare, and state and local government throughout the Ohio region. As you may already know, OARnet, a member of the Ohio Technology Consortium (OH-TECH), operates technology infrastructure comprising 1,850 miles of fiber backbone connecting its constituents. In the course of offering shared services over this infrastructure, we have seen that the demand for secure, web-based services and the growth of threats to those services has outpaced the disparate levels of adoption of trusted identity within the Ohio community. Our previous work, including an extensive member survey, has shown that poor adoption is because of a combination of economic, technical, and business factors. To overcome these barriers, we propose to investigate three key enhancements to the current state of the art in trusted federated identity: (1) broad deployment of Identity-as-a-Service (IaaS); (2) development of tools for managing a federation middle tier; and (3) integration of key legacy services into the new identity fabric. This program will allow us to deploy the technology quickly and effectively; to increase its scope of impact to include underserved segments of the community; and to investigate pursuing a public-private partnership solution.
It's exciting to see the changes happening with security, privacy, and provisioning. The OARnet team is pleased to make this web resource available for the benefit of the community.