Case Study: LIGO manages access with Grouper
LIGO faced a big identity management challenge. Find out why they chose Grouper as its manageable, scalable infrastructure of choice.
Software: InCommon Trusted Access Platform
Scholarly Collaborations
Community-designed collaboration solutions
Collaboration is how we do our work. The InCommon Trusted Access Platform was built by the community specifically for research and education and its complex collaboration needs.
Eliminate barriers to collaboration — across campus or around the world
Members of research organizations and virtual organizations have similar issues: They come from different organizations, identity already in hand, needing access to all of the tools, instruments, and services involved with the collaboration. They use different email systems, have cloud-based resources managed by different IT teams, and yet need to work as though they were all located in the same building at the same institution.
The InCommon Trusted Access Platform was developed by the research and education community with just this problem in mind. Features include:
- Single sign-on access with home institution credentials (no need to create accounts and user IDs), including research support like CILogon
- Fine-grained control over permissions and access to individual resources
- Partner add-ons (e.g.OAuth, OpenID Connect) and native SAML support enable integration with a wide range of resources
- Options to implement directly or work with CILogon to host
Using the InCommon Trusted Access Platform, you can focus more of your time on the specific needs of the project at hand, less on user access management technology.
- Community-designed solutions
- Innovative and trusted technology
- Enables academic collaboration and access to cloud services
How others succeeded
COmanage can help
COmanage ties together mailing lists, authentication, etc., so you can focus on advancing research and scholarship, what you do best.
“A key lesson learned is that a collaboration the size of LIGO cannot ignore identity management and all of the related issues, including group membership.”
Scott Koranda, senior scientist with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) project. LIGO selected Grouper as the single place where the information about groups, memberships, and (eventually) roles would be housed and from which other pieces of the infrastructure could draw.