Cirrus Identity SAML Bridge

Cirrus SAML Bridge Key Features:

• Includes support for all federated service providers. 
• Supports multi-lateral federation.
• Supports REFEDS Research and Scholarship standard release of attributes for trusted federation Service Providers. 
• Supports REFEDS multi-factor authentication (MFA) context to meet MFA signaling requirements for federation service providers.
• Custom DNS Add-On supports faster migration of existing services to the Bridge.
• Support for custom metadata aggregates or attribute release policies.

Cirrus Hosting Key Features:

• Self-service access to the Cirrus Administration Console to view Bridge configuration.
• Infrastructure hosted, managed, upgraded and maintained by Cirrus Identity in two geographic data center zones for fault tolerance, redundancy, improved disaster recovery and faster business resumption.
• Cirrus Identity has completed the EDUCAUSE Higher Education Vendor Assessment Toolkit for security standards and the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template for section 508.
• Support is available 24 hours every day.

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Cirrus Identity sets subscription prices for higher education budgets - we offer great value and affordable prices!

"We didn’t have the time to implement Shibboleth and were happy not to. Good possibilities without the hassle. We can react to new security requirements - easy, fast and compliant."

What is an Education & Research Federation?

eduGAIN is an interfederation service that connects identity federations around the world and simplifies access to content, services and resources for the global research and education community. eduGAIN comprises over 60 national federations. 

Federations help students, researchers and educators access online services with their trusted institutional credentials (username and password).  This reduces costs, complexity and security risks for Service Providers that develop applications for educational and research markets and institutions that need scalable access to global services while maintaining control over user management.

Cirrus Identity has worked with many national federations including:  InCommon (United States), CAF (Canada), UK Federation (United Kingdom) and RedCLARA (Latin America).  

The federations perform many tasks including evaluating member institutions, gathering metadata about their identity providers and service providers (applications), providing a framework for interoperability and much more.  An interoperability standard that is critical to global Identity and Access Management is multilateral federation.  The Cirrus Identity Bridge supports multilateral federation. 

For More Information:

• eduGAIN
• InCommon

 More Cirrus Identity Learning Center articles coming soon

What is Multilateral Federation?

The Cirrus SAML Bridge supports multilateral federation.  Multilateral federation facilitates collaboration across multiple organizations around the world. It is a critical component to Identity and Access Management (IAM) architecture in higher education and research.

Many commercial IAM solutions can be configured to sign into 1000s of custom SAML applications. These types of integrations are called bilateral integrations - the IAM administrator and the application owner exchange information on signing keys, URLs, attribute requirements and metadata to integrate.

In education and research, there is a need to share services across institutions for collaboration. Individually contacting hundreds of universities or service providers for each shared service is impractical - so the education and research community has developed a global network of identity federations to serve as a  trusted third party. 

Multilateral federation is an authentication standard that enables access to metadata from trusted identity and service providers in the eduGAIN national federations.  Multilateral federation provides a trust framework that allows a service provider to trust hundreds of identity providers at once, without a painstaking and time-consuming integration. 

Since commercial vendors don't support multilateral federation, most educational institutions install, configure and maintain Shibboleth or simpleSAMLphp (SSP).  The Cirrus SAML Bridge is a hosted alternative to Shibboleth or SSP.  In some situations, the SAML Bridge is also an alternative to running ADFS.

For More Information:

• Multilateral Federations & Azure AD
• Multilateral Federations & Okta