InCommon's 20-Year Milestone

We are reaching the end of our year-long celebration of InCommon’s 20th birthday. As we draw to a close, we highlight an interview I held with a pivotal figure in the research and higher education (R&E) community: Rachana Ananthakrishnan, the executive director and head of products for Globus at the University of Chicago.

Globus provides an important infrastructure allowing researchers to move and share data reliably and securely, compute across systems easily, and automate research tasks. Over the years, InCommon and Globus have worked together to connect researchers, enable collaboration, and build a trusted access community.

Rachana has an extensive background in data management, cyberinfrastructure, and security. In her roles at Argonne National Lab and the University of Chicago, Rachana has directed security and data management for several initiatives funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Institutes of Health.

As the executive director for Globus, Rachana brings an important and invaluable set of perspectives that represent the needs of researchers and research projects worldwide to InCommon leadership. Rachana is in her second year on the InCommon Steering Committee and serves on the InCommon Trust and Identity Program Advisory Group.

It is great to have access to Rachana’s expertise and experiences running a nonprofit technology service organization. InCommon is better off because she has shared her wisdom and passion for research with the InCommon community.

In our interview, Rachana highlighted how Globus has utilized InCommon tools in its mission to connect researchers and where she sees the collaboration between our two organizations headed in the future.

Kevin: Reflecting on the past 20 years, what do you believe has been InCommon’s most significant achievement?

Rachana: I have always believed that InCommon’s superpower lies in the community it has cultivated within the trusted access space of R&E.

The unique constraints and challenges — or, more positively, opportunities — in the R&E space are well understood by the InCommon team. InCommon has established itself as a collaborative and trusted leader in this area.

Kevin: Can you describe how InCommon has helped Globus achieve its mission in the research space? Are there any particular moments that stick out to you?

Rachana: The mission of the Globus team at the University of Chicago is to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of researchers engaged in data-driven science and scholarship through sustainable software. When we launched the platform about 15 years ago, we provided a handful of methods for researchers to log in to Globus. Some methods required the creation of new accounts, while others allowed direct integration with specific projects and institutions.

From day one, we knew we needed a scalable solution to provide access to hundreds of institutions and thousands of researchers. Because the sustainability of the solution was also crucial, it had to require no (or minimal) additional investment from institutions and low maintenance overhead for us as we expanded.

InCommon Federation was the answer. In 2012, we integrated InCommon Identity Providers (IdPs) via CILogon, which was needed for protocol translation since we wanted to support web-based flows more easily. We not only added the ability for federated login to the Globus platform but also engineered solutions for single sign-on users to access data assets via the platform.

We now have over 1,900 IdPs that users can use with our ecosystem, and about 95% of that comes via InCommon Federation. The multiplier effect of using InCommon was phenomenal.

Kevin: What problem(s) have InCommon tools and services solved for Globus and the research/researchers you support?

Rachana: In addition to the authentication and single sign-on I mentioned, I’ll highlight another key use case: collaborative data sharing in the research data management space. This process is simplified through the use of InCommon Federation with Globus data sharing.

Globus provides researchers with the ability to securely share data with their collaborators. Most often, they span both colleagues at their institution and those at other institutions. Thanks to the federated identities integration, collaborators can access shared data using their existing institutional identities, eliminating the need for new accounts.

The same mechanisms enable Globus to facilitate sharing data on commercial cloud providers. Thus, collaborators can log in with their institutional credentials instead of using vendor-specific authentication to access data.

This integration has lowered barriers to adoption and simplified both audit and permissions tracking.

Kevin: How do you envision Globus and InCommon will work together to serve the needs of the R&E community in the coming decades?

Rachana: InCommon’s investments in digital identities and trust space are particularly relevant to us. There are a couple of areas where I see opportunities for collaboration to operate a secure platform with complex capabilities for thousands of researchers worldwide.

Research security and compliance continues to grow as an area of focus, so investments in areas supporting that, such as attribute and authentication assurance, will be valuable for the community. Globus platform services for managed compute and automation will benefit from such capabilities.

We also need to keep pushing the boundaries on making cyberinfrastructure more accessible along different dimensions: to a broader set of domains, especially those who are not traditionally users of large-scale compute; to a diverse audience, including smaller schools and minority-serving institutions; and to research that leverages data and other works from across multiple domains.

We need more streamlined digital identity management and innovation to support these evolving use cases. Collaboration with InCommon will continue to serve needs in this space.

Kevin: Looking ahead to the next 20 years, what do you envision for the future of InCommon?

Rachana: InCommon offers a unique value proposition for the R&E community. I envision it growing in its role as an organization with the expertise to drive evolution in trust and identity for R&E.

From developing standards and best practices and promoting widespread adoption and implementation of these standards to providing training and workforce development, InCommon is poised to play a critical role in R&E.

Kevin: What three words or phrases come to mind when you think of InCommon?

Rachana: Federation, collaboration, and trust.

Looking Forward

As you can see from Rachana’s interview, InCommon’s work is far from over. While we reflect on the innovations and successes from the past two decades, InCommon is looking forward to the future to see how collaborations with organizations like Globus will continue to drive progress in research.

There is still much work to be done, and the InCommon team can’t wait to see what kind of opportunities arise and what kind of relationships we will build in the coming years.