With the report of the EC final review and all formalities addressed, the AARC project has really come to its end. It has been an incredible journey and to witness the impact of AARC results to date is certainly a great achievement for everybody who participated in the project.

The report from the EC final review was very positive and recognised that the project “has delivered exceptional results with significant immediate or potential impact” and “has contributed to make significant progress in the harmonisation of policy and best practice, particularly in the areas of Operational Security and Incident Response”.

The EC review report also states that “the project team is to be commended for what it has achieved with the available budget and resources in a short time and a complex environment, in terms of deliverables and impact. AARC, as a whole, was deliberately defined with a short (4 year) timescale”.

AARC was particularly effective in creating a community, which remains very active and continues to maintain and further expand the AARC results. There is an increased interest in IdP-SPs proxies in the US and Australia as well, and so we think that AARC results will be able to support the scientific community globally.

The AARC website will be maintained and updated as needed. AARC work continues in different groups:

• AEGIS, the AARC Engagement Group for infrastructures – AEGIS gathers the representatives from research and e-infrastructures that operate an AARC BPA compliant AAI to discuss operational challenges and solutions to them. The AEGIS charter was finalised and published in Nov 2019. With the charter ready we will expand the AEGIS member base to allow for a broader participation. This will bring more discussion in the open and will attract more people that are investigating the usage of the AARC BPA. There is significant interest in this in Australia and US.
• Appint mailing list – the list was created already during the AARC project and hosted most of the technical discussion on the AARC technical discussions. The list is open to anybody interested on the topic.
• Some of the policy work will take place in AEGIS, however the AARC policy team since the start engaged with the wider security community in WISE, IGTF as well as with REFEDS. The work will continue in the same way as policy can only be effective if it is adopted globally.
• We continue to promote the AARC results; we recently presented them at the EOSC symposium in Budapest (a presentation in the plenary and one in the AAI track) and at the Internet2 TechEx meeting in US.

What’s Next ?

In 2020 we will work on several aspects, such as a review of the policy toolkit to make it more easily accessible  for service providers and for AAI operators that implement the AARC BPA.

The team will continue to work on the technical aspects and on new guidelines and explore new aspect to keep evolving the BPA.

More to come next year!