Providing seamless access to digital services is a critical part of the IT team’s role in higher education (HE) and further education (FE). When a lecturer struggles to access wifi on a remote campus, or a student can’t work out how to access digital course materials quickly, the result is a barrier to learning and […]
IdP operators: consider using MDQ (metadata query) Configuring your self-hosted IdP to use MDQ (metadata query) has three key benefits: a reduced memory footprint mitigation against a class of disruptive errors as the size of metadata increases robustness against problematic metadata. Half of the IdPs in the UK federation use MDQ already. The UK federation […]
Preparing for a new academic year is always a challenging time for IT teams. However, for New College of Humanities (NCH) in London, summer 2020 brought new challenges entirely. The IT team was faced with the integration of IT systems after its acquisition by Northeastern University, in the US, while at the same time […]
Have you got a stake in online learning at your institution? Looking for ways to develop your students’ digital experiences in 2022? Then look no further! Here lies a handy wrap-up of Jisc’s Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) student digital insights surveys. Looking at the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. Survey […]
A core aspect of Cyber Essentials is keeping your systems up to date. This is true both for operating systems and any installed apps or software, and these must always be kept updated. Applying these updates is one of the most important things you can do to improve security. It ensures that devices and software are not vulnerable to known […]
“Are THEY listening to us?” “Who’s they?” “You know, the phones, the laptops?” And so goes the conversation that I sometimes have with my wife. Perhaps after we’ve had a chat about hiking poles, when every ad on our social media feed then shows hiking poles, despite neither of us having directly Googled them. (Although […]
This year’s KuppingerCole European Identity and Cloud conference saw several talks about Zero Trust Models and Passwordless Authentication. No longer in cyber security is it enough to lock your front door and all of your windows, now the bad guys are ‘coming down the pipes’! To use X-Files parlance ‘Trust no one’ — not even […]
Welcome to this joint broadcast from Jisc‘s Trust and Identity and Security Services teams! What’s the score? In the new year, we will be changing the way you access the following services, making it easier for you to manage your existing subscriptions: Domain registry service (DRS) Primary nameserver service (PNS) We’re adding these services to the new […]
If your institution is considering the move to single sign-on (SSO) solutions, you might find colleagues asking; what does this mean? And what are the benefits? In short, an SSO authentication platform provides simple access control for authentication and authorisation for a whole organisation. In simple terms, this means users only need a single username […]
You wouldn’t serve someone alcohol without appropriate ID. Nor would you buy a car without airbags, or leave your phone unlocked in a busy pub. Federated access is the equivalent safety check for students and staff accessing your online resources. So if you’re not using federated access, how secure is your access management set-up? This post answers this question and […]