Cirrus Identity Blog | EdTech

An Identity Management Nightmare - Part 1 of 3

This blog also published on medium.

Introduction from Cirrus Identity CEO, Dedra Chamberlin

Cirrus Identity has been busy expanding our suite of services, and we are proud to announce our new Guest Management package. This packages combines social identity login (with our familiar social-to-saml gateway), a stand-alone external identity provider (branded with your campus look and feel) for users who don't want to use social login, our invitation service, an account linking service, an identity provider proxy, and APIs to integrate with your enterprise identity systems. Together, these services enhance the user experience for guests trying to gain online access at universities.

The growing need for campuses to simplify guest access to online services hasn’t been met with a viable solution, until now.

Cirrus Identity is happy to announce that we have joined Internet2 as an Industry Partner. Internet2 and InCommon are key strategic partners in achieving our goal of streamlining access to EdTech services. In 2014, we engaged actively with the Higher Ed identity community as a part of the InCommon Affiliate program, and through regular participation in InCommon sponsored workgroups and annual conferences. As the InCommon Affiliate program makes way for new Internet2 industry alliance programs, we look forward to continued engagement with InCommon, Internet2, other Net+ providers, and especially with the EdTech community, in 2015.

One of the most widely adopted unique identifiers in higher education federated identity management is eduPersonPrincipalName (ePPN), defined as part of the eduPerson LDAP schema established by Internet2’s Middleware Architecture Committee for Education (MACE-dir). Historically, ePPN is defined by a campus and includes a local, unique identifier (netID) scoped at the campus domain, e.g. netID@university.edu.