Internet2’s InCommon trust service has announced reaching the milestone of 400 participants. InCommon provides a secure and privacy-preserving trust fabric for research and higher education institutions, and their partners, in the United States. The total number of InCommon participants has grown from 264 at the beginning of 2011 to 400 today.

“InCommon has demonstrated a consistent pattern of growth since its inception in 2004,” said Jack Suess, chief information officer and vice president for information technology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and chair of the InCommon Steering Committee. “It is especially gratifying to see that we now have over 100 commercial service providers that are leveraging the power of the InCommon Federation. We are especially pleased to see the interest from vendors and campuses interested in the Internet2 NET+ Service program, which requires InCommon participation.”

The Internet2 NET+ Services program provides “above the network” services to Internet2 member organizations, including higher education, government, and industry. The new services are tailored to the needs of the Internet2 community, are cost and administratively effective, and leverage Internet2ʼs 100G network and InCommon trust services.

The 400 participating InCommon organizations include colleges and universities, research organizations, agencies of the U.S. government, and private companies that offer web-based resources and services. Participants can take advantage of four service offerings, including:

  1. The InCommon Federation, enabling federated identity management, a secure and privacy-preserving method for accessing third-party resources with one set of credentials. The federation now includes 300 organizations with 6 million faculty, students, and staff (https://incommon.org/federation/info/).
  2. The InCommon Certificate Service, offering unlimited server and personal certificates to the U.S. higher education community for a fixed annual fee. The number of subscribers has reached 163 in just under two years, saving the higher education community more than $1 million by providing a site license model for all of their certificate needs (certificate.incommon.org).
  3. The InCommon Assurance Program, providing for standards-based identity practices and higher levels of assurance. Nineteen campuses report working on qualifying for the Silver profile (assurance.incommon.org).
  4. The InCommon multifactor authentication services, providing easy-to-use and low-cost second-factor authentication services and devices (www.incommon.org/multifactor).

For more information, see www.incommon.org

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