Overview

Moving to different organisations, changing job positions or moving from a student to a staff member can be quite seamless although retaining data within third party applications such as Service Providers can be tricky. This guide takes you though the process of obtaining data from old institutional log ins, where possible.

Prerequisites

You must have an oganisational ID and still maintain access through the new organisation or your new position with the organisation. To check your level of access you would need to contact your local administration or identity provider to get al ist of third party service providers that are available to you. If you no longer have access to a service provider where you hold information, you may need to contact that Service Provider directly or your previous employer to obtain any data you may require. 

You will also require a shared token that was associated with your old institutional account or username.

Details

If you now have a new username and password after moving Institutions or organisations and require access to your previous or existing datasets, storage, information or preferences (e.g. CloudStor), please contact your local Service Desk who will arrange for the Service Provider (SP) Administrator or Identity Provider (IdP) Administrator to instigate moving of the SharedToken to the new institution.

Usually transferring data etc is possible for most services, however in some cases it is not feasible (e.g. Nectar Research Cloud). The SP will be able to advise on the possibility of this.

The most common example is when a research staff member leaves one university and another but still needs to (and is authorised to) access data, computing grids, instruments, or services they used previously. The auEduPersonSharedToken is the unique, persistent identifier that tells these services it’s the same person as before. It’s also possible for one person to be working at more then one university at the same time and to use the same auEduPersonSharedToken at both. The request would need to be initiated by the user, as they would be the only one to know they had joined a new university. It would involve an administrative verification process between the two universities which could simply be paper based.

If and where possible, we are able to move a shared token value, the access and information you require, will be restored and usable in the same capacity as have previously been used. Alternatively, if this option is not available, we may contact the third party to have your data transferred to your new institutional log in.

Outcome

Retention and access to data associated with old credentials either transferred to a new institutional account or a shared token linked to your new account. We are also making strides within the industry to associate other attributes to a persons name and log in information which may mean that data and information about a unique user may remain the same including access (If Permitted) by using other persistent attributes that will remain with a user for the entirety of a lifecycle or as long as some kind of log in credentials are associated with a user. Irrespective of log in credentials, the information collected and maintained by third party service providers will be retained and can be accessed from various log ins when using unique identifiers such as ORCID ID which can be used to identify a person and supercede limitations to credential based information.