In February, the Federated Academic Community (CAFe) reached the milestone of 100 customers in the identity providers’ category, four years after launching and operating continuously. It consolidate CAFe’s position as the main identity federation among the academic networks in Latin America.

“The relevance of such number becomes clearer when we consider that each institution usually has over one thousand people connected to it, including professors, students and administrative employees. We are, therefore, talking about hundreds of thousands of users potentially benefit from the facilities that the federation offers in access to web services”, explains the service’s Manager Jean Carlo Faustino.

Such success is directly connected to the increase of the federation services offer. It all started in 2012, with Capes’ periodicals portal, and currently encompasses most of RNP services, in addition to others provided by user organizations and international institutions.

The investment in the continuous improvement of the service adhesion and ratification process was also fundamental. “The joint work among different RNP teams – the Customer Relations, IT, Service Desk and Services managment, in addition to the support from suppliers – was crucial in winning over so many clients”, the service’s Manager stressed.

Another important point was the implementation of participative governance, which relies on an Advisory Committee, which assists with the assessment of the federation’s operation rules, and a Technical Committee, which assists with the development of and debate about the technologies used.

“The number is indeed a milestone, but there is still a lot to be done”, Faustino states. Currently, 80% of the Federal Institutes (IFs) in Brazil are already in CAFe. However, the goal is to have all of them in the federation and replicate the same scenario for the public universities and research institutes.

In addition to the 100 customers’ institutions in the identity providers’ category, the federation has 24 specific services that are offered upon the use of the same credentials for authentication, one of the federation essential characteristics. The expectation is that such number will also increase during this year.

International trend

The federated authentication services implementation was already a trend in countries of Europe and in the United States. “Reaching the 100 institution customers' milestone means that the concept of federated access was been accepted, has worked in Brazil. What was deemed as a trend has become a reality in the academic circles”, Jean Carlo Faustino concludes.