On 19 January SIG-MSP met virtually for the third time since its last face-to-face meeting in Istanbul in March 2020, when the pandemic started hitting the world.
With 40 participants from a mix of organisations, the meeting started with a focus on Trust & Identity: Licia Florio from GÉANT talked about My Academic ID and Marina Adomeit, SUNET gave an update on the T&I activities within the GÉANT project. GÉANT, together with a number NRENs, is participating in dedicated EC funded projects to deliver a core production platform to enable federated access to Erasmus+ services. Licia updated us on the project’s digitalisation process, showed the roadmap to paperless mobility and talked about the European Student Card Initiative (ESCI) which will enable easy electronic authentication for students. InAcademia, which went into production one year ago, is seeing a progressive uptake across Europe. Innovation is still an important part of T&I, currently organised in the agile incubator initiative. A new incubator cycle is about to start and NRENs are invited to propose their innovative ideas. Development for eduGAIN and eduroam is focussing on supporting services and NRENs are being invited to adopt and test new tools: eduGAIN f-ticks and eduroam managed SP. The eduTEAMS service is used as a platform to support research infrastructure AAIs, EOSC AAI and student mobility.
The second main topic of the meeting was Security. Alf Moens, new Cybersecurity lead at GÉANT, together with Evangelos Spatharas, GÉANT’s Head of Security, prepared an overview of what is in stock for security now and in the coming years, presenting actual trends and the status of current and upcoming challenges and security services for GÉANT and the community.
Three lightning talks followed. Radovan Igliar from CESNET spoke about eIDAS, remote digital signing and digital seals; Daniel Wustenberg presented on the GÉANT Compendium 2019 and its survey-based structure, database and reporting site and asked for feedback from SIG-MSP on how to improve on the current state of the project. Remco Poortinga van Wijnen from SURF illustrated the steps towards the creation of the SURFsoc, as a result of the infamous ransomware attack on the University of Maastricht a year ago, to reduce vulnerability to similar attacks in the future.
The discussion then briefly moved to COVID funding; some NRENs have received funds from their governments to extend their service portfolios whilst others are considering applying for COVID relief funds to support their national digitisation agenda. Due to the considerable interest generated by this topic, it was decided to make it the focus of future meetings to give participants the opportunity to share funding experiences and ideas. Additional topics suggested for the next SIG-MSP meeting, planned in April 2020, included eduTeams and a mini workshop on the GÉANT Compendium.
Please, note that presentations on T&I and Security will be available on the e-academy site in the coming week:
https://e-academy.geant.org/moodle/
For more information about SIG-MSP, visit:
https://www.geant.org/People/Community_Programme/Special_Interest_Groups/Pages/SIG-MSP.aspx
