The group of almost 120 organisations (connected IdP's) in The Netherlands who use SURFconext, consists of universities, university hospitals and tertiary medical teaching hospitals, universities of applied sciences, research institutions and senior secondary vocational education institutions. Together they represent a group of 1.5 million users. These users generate almost 2 million logins per month, using more than 100 different cloud services.
SURFconext allows users to have access to services offered by multiple Service Providers using only 1 account. Besides, SURFconext facilitates online collaboration in the cloud, both between users within the same organisation as between users from different organisations.
For IdP's
If you connect your organisation to SURFconext, you will enjoy the following advantages:
- By connecting to SURFconext only once, your users will have access to all available services.
- You don't have to implement and maintain a custom made connection to each service or Service Provider seperately.
- You can regulate authorisation for entire groups of students and employees easily.
- The number of available services is ever growing, since more and more organisations choose to use SURFconext.
- You can integrate your internal authorization resources with SURFconext.
- SURFconext offers more flexible and cheaper licences.
- Easy integration of services thanks to open standards
For SP's
- Connecting once to the platform makes your service available to all connected institutions (connected IdP's).
- Fast and easy access for more than 1 million users.
- Certainty about identity of users.
- Less user administration.
- A single point of contact with one connection.
- A long-time trusted partner of education and research institutions.
- Double security through SURFsecureID.
- A single link provides strong authentication for all institutions. As an extra advantage, authentication tools are issued by the institutions locally.
For end users
- Simple, secure access to cloud services with the institution's account, i.e. no need for separate user accounts for individual services (single sign-on)
- Protection of privacy in the sense that the minimum amount of personal data is disclosed to the service provider
- It is always clear with which services the user's data is being shared
- Access to services from the international education and research community
Why should I connect to SURFconext?
Get to know more SURFconext here and watch a short introduction video.
Whether you find connecting to SURFconext easy or not, depends on your knowledge and background of our used protocols. Developers familiar with these are able to connect services within a days work. Take your time to get to know SAML or OpenID Connect. These are open standards and used in most countries and many sectors. So whenever and wherever you're offering your service, you can re-use this time and effort you've put into connecting to SURFconext.