What is Collaborate?
Collaborate is an cloud-hosted Trust & Identity solution that can be deployed and maintained for a fraction of the cost of in-house solutions. It is professionally operated, continuously monitored, and expertly maintained. Always up, and always up to date*!
Collaborate offers essential access management services, all configured in a single, easy-to-use portal.
Managed eduroam – A FreeRADIUS-in-the-cloud service that allows your students and faculty to access the internet at any university, research lab, library, or other location broadcasting the eduroam service. It also allows you to host other eduroam users on your campus.
Managed SAML – A Shibboleth® in-the-cloud service that gives your users secure, single-sign-on access to web applications and services that support the InCommon® Federation, or other connected eduGain federations throughout the world.
Benefits of Collaborate
Other access management solutions typically support only one of these access management technologies. Collaborate provides a single solution to access management, reducing the time and effort spent on managing and administering multiple services. You pay only for the components you need.
Collaborate is substantially less expensive than the cost of maintaining these technologies in-house. A single annual fee makes it easy to budget for the cost of Collaborate, and frees up your in-house resources to work on more strategic projects.
Collaborate is supported in North America by Painless Security, co-developers of the Collaborate technology. Collaborate is operated and maintained by world-class technology experts, freeing you from the time and expense of tracking vulnerabilities and deploying updates in-house, and eliminating the risk of running out-of-date software.
What does Collaborate do?
- Authenticate user credentials against your Microsoft® Active Directory (AD), Microsoft Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS), or other Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory.
- Authorize users via group memberships that are defined in Microsoft AD, ADFS, or LDAP.
- Provide user attributes to services based on policies determined by group membership.
- Support accounting and reporting of user authentications and service use.
With our highly-specialized knowledge of the R&E sectors' needs, we have built the most technologically advanced, comprehensive, accessible, and cost-effective access management solution on the market.
How Collaborate works
When you subscribe to the Collaborate service, you choose which components (Managed SAML or Managed eduroam) you need. Then, guided and assisted by our team of expert technical specialists, you will configure your service(s) in our service portal, and download and deploy a virtual private network (VPN) endpoint. Our service portal will bring up virtual machines to run and configure Shibboleth or FreeRADIUS instances in the cloud, securely connecting to your AD, ADFS, or LDAP directory across the VPN. Cloud components will be maintained and upgraded, as needed. The service portal will store your desired configuration across upgrades, and reflect your configuration into the updated configuration formats of these components after each upgrade is completed.
You can make changes to authorization and attribute release policies and view your usage reports through the service portal. Our experts are available to help you make the most of the service, and we will provide you with any assistance that you need. Collaborate is delivered as a fully managed service, but you are free to manage as little or as much as you like using the service portal.
*A detailed SLA is available upon request.