For 20 years, the Internet2 community has developed identity and trust
programs and software to make it easier to offer and access services and
collaborate. Each component was designed to address a community-identified
gap in commonly available tools.
In 2015, the Trust and Identity in Education and Research (TIER) work was
initiated to tie these separate components together and form an identity and
access management platform that is easy to manage and install, and
preconfigured to leverage InCommon and global federation. In short, TIER
would add needed functionality while making things easier for operations.
To support this goal, the TIER project team set about to:

Integrate the existing components to make them easier to connect and
use.

Package the components to reduce the time necessary to install and
manage the software.

Identify and integrate additional components to complete a full-featured
identity and access management platform.

This report provides a short history of the TIER initiative, its accomplishments,
some metrics and financial information. Accomplishments include:

Reducing the installation and basic software configuration time from
several hours to less than 10 minutes.

Adding capability to provide access for end-users while also increasing
security by removing access when appropriate.

Providing the capability of managing access for guests, collaborators or
third parties as well as students, faculty, and staff.

Preconfiguring connections with global federations (adhering to
community practices).

Jump-starting a program to help organizations adopt the software and
move to production faster, including training, documentation and
consulting.
Building enforcement of community metadata requirements into
InCommon federation operations.

The Trust and Identity in Education and Research (TIER) work began in mid-
2015 with extensive community workshops, gathering more than 100 common
identity and access management challenges. Community members identified
the major gaps and key requirements to be addressed, and formed working
groups in four areas:

In early 2016, 49 higher education institutions committed to providing funding
over three years to support the TIER effort (see Appendix A).
In October 2017 (at about the halfway point for the funding), community
architects and developers met at the Internet2 Technology Exchange to
evaluate the progress made thus far and to set priorities for the next 18
months.

At this point, 16 campuses had started implementing at least one of the TIER
component packages. To increase adoption, the TIER investors agreed to
allocate some funding to support a program to provide implementation
assistance, training and consulting. Ten campuses joined the Campus Success
Program, each with the goal of adopting at least one of the components. Most
campuses either successfully adopted at least one component or made
substantial progress towards that end. The program also provided valuable
feedback on barriers to adoption and community needs for training and
assistance.

To date, there are over 100 TIER component packages actively being run in
testing, production or training.

Packaging of the TIER software components in Docker containers and
the development of a continuous development and integration pipeline
resulting in:

Reduced automated build times to produce new containers from
several hours to 15 minutes or less.

Improved the installation and basic configuration time for the
components from potentially several hours to less than 10
minutes.

Identifying of midPoint as an additional key software component to act
as a registry and powerful provisioning/de-provisioning engine.

Developing a continuous stream of demonstrations and presentations
for key Internet2 and community meetings to share progress and
viability with the community.

Adding telemetry to the TIER packages (status and version installed) to
help estimate adoption rates.

Publishing the Grouper Deployment Guide to assist in the adoption and
deployment of the Grouper enterprise access management software.

Implementing the TIER Campus Success Program, a collaboration of 10
campuses working together to deploy one or more of the TIER
components. Each campus also produced a case study to share with
the community.

Developing a graphical user interface for the Shibboleth Identity
Provider software to eliminate some manual processes.

Refactoring and streamlining the Federation Manager software for ease
of use by site administrators and allowing for rapid approval of routine
federation metadata changes.

Much of this work was accomplished through hours of community design,
architecture, and best practices discussion. At the end of 2018, the cumulative
metrics for associated conference calls and meetings included:

525 working group and related community calls.

11,936 collaboration hours (calls and face-to-face meetings) comprising:

3,509 Internet2 staff hours.

8,426 community representative hours.

Completed the final TIER Investor memos of understanding and in doing so, secured the 3-year funding for the program

Chartered and constituted 4 key TIER Working Groups to drive specification work for Entity Registry, standardized Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Data Structures, a Security Framework and practices, and the Packaging of the software

Conducted community survey about how TIER components should be packaged

Arizona State University
Baylor University
Boston University
Caltech (California Institute of Technology)
Carnegie Mellon University
Case Western Reserve University
Clemson University
Cornell University
Duke University
Harvard University
Indiana University
Lafayette College
Louisiana State University
MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
New York University
Northwestern University
Old Dominion University
Oregon State University
The Pennsylvania State University
Purdue University – Main Campus
Rice University
Stanford University
Tulane University
University of Arizona
University of California – Berkeley
University of California – Merced
University of Chicago
University of Florida
University of Hawaii – Manoa
University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign
University of Iowa
University of Maryland – Baltimore County
University of Maryland – College Park
University of Miami
University of Michigan – Ann Arbor
University of Missouri – Columbia
University of Nebraska – Lincoln
University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
University of Notre Dame
University of Oregon
The Ohio State University
University of Pittsburgh – Pittsburgh Campus
University of Utah
University of Virginia
University of Washington
University of Wisconsin – Madison
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Washington University in Saint Louis
Yale University