About eduGAIN

eduGAIN provides an efficient, flexible way for participating federations, and their affiliated users and services, to interconnect

Today, online services are crucial for research and education. Students, teachers, researchers and institution staff rely on them for collaboration through many web services. This can be for e-learning, tea​ching and conferencing, analysing and sharing data, accessing journals and libraries etc. Enabling easy and convenient access to users is a key part of delivering a service. Service providers do not want the headaches associated with issuing passwords to users, and the user does not want yet another password.

With just one trusted identity provided by user’s institution as part of an identity federation participating in eduGAIN, users can access services from other participating federations. Even better, it works with single sign-on (SSO), so that user needs to login only one time during a browser session.

R&E identity federations are typically deployed on a national level and use different architectures, systems and policies. eduGAIN enables identity federations to interconnect, so that participating institutions and services can collaborate without the need to establish individual bilateral connections.

eduGAIN is a global initiative. Around the world there are more than 49 federations participating in or in the process of joining eduGAIN, with more than 2,600 identity providers and 1,800 service providers.

Benefits of eduGAIN

  Federations

  • More services for your users available through other federations.
  • Saves time and lower administration costs as no need for bilateral federation agreements.
  • Trustworthy – secure collaboration and exchange of federation information.

  Service providers

  • Grow your audience by making your service available to a greater number of users.
  • Lower costs per user – your audience grows without increasing costs for maintenance of users credentials.

  Identity providers

  • ​Offer more to your users – enable access to a wider range of services than are available locally or nationally.
  • No extra administrative burden if you are already participating in an identity federation.

  Users – identity holders

  • Access a wider range of services than are available nationally or locally.
  • One digital identity for all services connected through eduGAIN.
  • eduGAIN is ‘invisible’ to you so you can access services without extra effort.