Internet2’s Trust and Identity in Education and Research (TIER) program is a community-driven, consistent approach to identity and access management. TIER aims to simplify campus processes and advance inter-institutional collaboration and research.

"We view TIER as a coordinated approach to enable trust and identity in education and research at scale for thousands of institutions and service providers while also satisfying diverse local use cases."

—Ron Kraemer, Vice President and CIDO, University of Notre Dame

TIER was established to

• Sustain the investment the community has made in developing a set of critically important identity-related software components;
• Integrate them together with common APIs, data structures, development and release practices and schedules, and facilitative and flexible deployment packaging;
• Extend their features to support the common functionality in the set of the campus contributed use cases.

TIER is both an open-source toolset
and a campus practice set

The toolset builds on and extends investments already made in identity and access management services and software, enhancing and simplifying their deployment. TIER delivers a packaged suite of components (Shibboleth Identity Provider, Grouper, and COmanage) with a set of APIs to provide consistency and flexibility. The TIER software will have a regular integration and release schedule. The components will be packaged and released (initially) as virtual machine images that have been fashioned from preconfigured Docker containers to work well together in the context of the InCommon Federation.

Just as important as this integration is the creation of a long-term model for sustainable support and development. TIER institutions are creating and adopting a community-defined set of practices to ensure a common approach to providing access to resources for researchers, faculty, staff, and students.

TIER Tire Kickers

A growing number of campuses are TIER tire kickers; downloading and testing the container-based versions of the software. If you'd like the contacts at these institutions, or if you want to add your organization to the tire-kicking list, email emily@internet2.edu.

• Arizona State University
• Boston University
• Duke University
• Indiana University
• Medical University of South Carolina
• The Ohio State University
• University of California, Berkeley
• University of Illinois
• University of Maryland
• University of Miami
• University of Michigan
• University of North Carolina
• University of Pennsylvania
• University of Virginia
• University of Wisconsin-Madison