Administration of Virtual Organisations

A Virtual Organisation (VO) is defined as a:
“flexible, secure coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions and resources, in order to achieve a common purpose”.
By definition this is the problem that Grid is set out to address. VO infrastructures can differ greatly and are driven by the requirements and constraints of the application domain. SIMDAT focuses on operational requirements for VO’s such as user management, information security and privacy, authorisation and authentication.


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Goals and Achievements

The goal of the VO technology area has been to investigate how VO’s are formed within the application areas and try and identify operational barriers to the adoption of SIMDAT technologies and the formation of VO’s. Once these barriers have been identified suitable solutions can be sought.
The VO area has undertaken a study of each of the application areas and analysed operational security policies, interviewed information security personnel and received feed back from the SIMDAT partners. This has enabled the identification of a number of key areas where effort can be focused to decrease the barriers to adoption of SIMDAT technologies by industry. These include audit, grid licensing models, accreditation of grid middleware and enterprise identity scheme integration.


Role in SIMDAT

The research and technology work on VO administration to be performed in the SIMDAT programme is split into three VO lifecycle phases: 'Identification and Formation', 'Operation' and 'Dissolution'. This activity will evaluate and collect the state-of-the-art in VO support techniques across the global Grid community in the form of standardised technology, tools and processes. This will be aligned with the needs of the SIMDAT application sectors, and a template process will be generated and supported.

The results of this technology can be found under Grid Solution Portfolio at Security.