Identity and access management (IAM) is the collection of standards, policies and technologies that allows data sharing systems to know who is attempting to access data and provides information that enables systems to determine whether to permit access.
In a federated environment such as the Australian/global genomics community, IAM is the glue which enables loosely coupled systems to establish strong trust relationships for the purposes of data sharing.
Several systems for this purpose have been developed globally, including GA4GH's Passport, GA4GH AAI Profile, NIH’s RAS, and CILogon.
In Australia, we establishing these technologies through our Human Genomes Platform Project.
This work aims to explore and implement systems for piloting both across the participating repositories, and nationally that can be used to confidently ascertain that someone being granted access is in fact who they say they are and that their professional identity and role is taken into account.