Tuakiri transitions from NeSI to REANNZ
NeSI has completed work with Tuakiri, New Zealand Access Federation Inc. and REANNZ to transition responsibility for the management and delivery of Tuakiri from NeSI to REANNZ starting 1 August 2015. Earlier this year Tuakiri's members and the REANNZ Board completed a due diligence process and agreed to a merger of Tuakiri with REANNZ.
The Tuakiri service was initiated by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (formerly MSI and MoRST), established at the University of Auckland and delivered by NeSI over the last three and a half years. NeSI is the biggest NZ eResearch user of the Tuakiri service, reducing barriers to collaboration and innovation. NeSI has successfully managed and operated Tuakiri, providing a resilient platform for the delivery of Tuakiri services.
Tuakiri enables federation users to seamlessly, securely and easily access federation enabled resources at remote locations using a single set of credentials provided by their home institutions. Tuakiri delivers the legal, governance, policy and technical frameworks required to form an identity federation between participating members, currently being New Zealand Universities, Crown Research Institutes and an Institute of Technology and Polytechnics.
The core value proposition for Tuakiri is that as a commonly shared ICT service for education and research, it minimises the effort and administrative overhead for each individual subscriber and service provider of managing federated identity (aka single sign on federated access). Without Tuakiri, an individual institution would have to negotiate a series of unique one-on-one arrangements to provide their users with access to inter-institutional services or commonly shared online resources.
Similarly, to carry out research collaborations, individual institutions would have to negotiate one-on-one agreements with a range of different hosts and providers for access to national eResearch infrastructure such as the New Zealand Data Fabric and NeSI HPC platforms.
Finally, a national federation provides a building block for research collaboration on a global scale through inter- federation with international federations interconnecting our global research partners. Tuakiri is now a significant and sustainable part of the New Zealand eResearch infrastructure landscape.
Tuakiri is also well known in the global research and education community and consortiums, including maintaining a strong relationship with the Australian Access Federation (AAF) with collaborations occur on a regular basis across business development, customer experience, technical development and service innovation to provide a service that is fit-for-purpose and scalable on demand. Both national federations have a common goal to improve business outcomes and realise benefits for all participants. In 2015, the Tuakiri-AAF relationship is being further strengthened through a business-to-business agreement. Additional collaborations are underway with Géant Association/REFEDs Global Working-group, and the Asia Pacific Advanced Network IAM Taskforce of which Tuakiri is a member.
Tuakiri currently has 17 members and enables 63 services with approximately 200,000 federated sessions occurring per year. Tuakiri is working with the Universities NZ/ICTC group and Wellington agencies Tertiary Education Commission, Ministry of Education, and New Zealand Qualifications Authority through a working group to look at IAM and Federated Identity Management needs in the NZ research and education sector and across the NZ school sector. This is work in progress and aligns with the vision for the service.
Future plans will focus on continued delivery of value to Tuakiri members by enabling business and productivity services, research and scholarly services, and research collaboration across the NZ research and education sector.
