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Students, teachers and servers of almost all the 38 Federal Institutes of Education, Science and Technology already enjoy the advantages offered by the Federated Academic Community (CAFe), which brings together Brazilian educational and research institutions in a trusted network, enabling remote access to various services focused on the academia through a single credential (login and password).

Part of RNP Service Catalog, CAFe has over 70 client institutions and a large number of organizations in the accession process according to data from July 2014. This result, especially with the Federal Institutes (FIs), was reached through CAFe's expansion project, launched in 2013, from a commitment signed between RNP, the Infrastructure Thematic Commission and the Coordination of the Information Technology Forum (FORTI).

The Federal Institute of Santa Catarina (IFSC) was benefitted by the agreement and currently provides access to CAFe to 2,000 servers and 13,000 students, in 21 campi throughout the state. “Before the adherence, the access to Journals Portal of the Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), for example, could only happen inside the campus, and required setting up a VPN. Now, they can access the Journals Portal content at home, or anywhere else”, the institution’s IT Director Emerson Mello states.

At the Federal Institute of Rondônia (IFRO), the main benefit brought by CAFe was strengthening the long-distance teaching. “The service enabled students and teachers to access, in a more secure and integrated way, the content of around 28 long-distant courses, through the Video@RNP portal”, Joilson Dantas, from IFRO IT Department, says.

The CAPES Journals Portal is one of CAFe's most accessed service providers, due to its vast academic content, which gathers approximately 35,000 journals, over 150,000 books, 130 reference databases, various technical standards, databases of theses and dissertations. If your institution meets the criteria of free access to the Journals Portal and already accesses the content available in the virtual library, you can become a CAFe identity provider to have federated remote access, from anywhere in the world, to every content of the portal, through the computer or mobile devices.

Other free access national service providers are the Video@RNP portal, which centers three services: Video on Demand, TV Signal Broadcasting and Live Video Broadcasting; the Journal and Event Management System (JEMS), system that gathers scientific articles from the Brazilian Computing Society, kept by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS); and the PADBR computational grid, coordinated by the National Laboratory for Scientific Computing (LNCC).

New federations in Latin America and the Caribbean

The use of federated services is also expanded due to international partnerships, which increase the number of service providers offered to the users. It is the case of the integration with GÉANT’s eduGAIN service, a pan-European gigabit research network, facilitating access to federated services of different countries. CAFe was the first outside Europe to adhere, in December 2011.

From eduGAIN, CAFe users can access many services of interest for the teaching and research activities development, such as searching services in cultural repositories, scientific applications portals, sharing and research of educational videos, services for scheduling meetings, among others.

Because of international cooperation, RNP has also led the other identity federations emergence in Latin America and the Caribbean, through the coordination of actions related to identity management in the Elcira (Europe Latin America Collaborative e-Infrastructure for Research Activities) project.

After Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador launched their first identity federations, COFre (integrated to eduGAIN), COLFIRE, and MINGA, respectively. In addition, two other federations are on their pilot phase in Peru (Inca Federation) and Argentina (MATE). “The identity federations are a global trend in academic networks to facilitate the provision and use of free and commercial network services, which can be offered at a much lower cost, due to the ease and reliability of this type of access”, clarifies RNP Services Manager, Jean Carlo Faustino.

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In 2014, RNP launched a statistics system (link is external) to monitor the accesses authenticated by CAFe. Through a web platform with a friendly interface of simple navigation, it is possible to view reports in an integrated manner, which show the accesses number performed by CAFe by state or region in a determined period, the number of identity and service providers and a ranking of accesses by federation, by user institution. The goal is to give transparency to the data and subsidize the service management.