An Identity Provider as a Service platform for the eduGAIN research and education community

A SAML Identity Provider (IdP) is the core entity required by organizations to connect to a national research and education (R&E) federation and, through it, to the global eduGAIN community. With growing networks, evolving technologies and higher security standards being introduced in (R&E), the task of creating and managing IdPs becomes more and more complex. The commonly used software solutions to deploy an IdP, e.g. Shibboleth and SimpleSAMLphp, both require hand-on experience on SAML and specific knowledge of the products. Furthermore, the global collaboration requires a growing set of configuration options to be implemented, for example standards and policies being introduced into the community or new identity attributes. The complexity has reached a point where it is very demanding for organizations to handle the technical challenges, leaving them unable to join the R&E community. To tackle this issues, an IdP deployment platform was designed to support especially small and medium sized organizations by creating an IdP and join a national identity federation.