Research facilities, research collaborations and researchers have voiced challenges managing easy and secure access for researcher collaborations to research applications for many years. Basically: creating and managing accounts and enabling researchers to login to applications takes way to much time and effort. The FIM4R-initiative, Federated Identity Management for Research, has published reports about it. Many well intended solutions have been proposed over many years, but for many reasons, all efforts did no solve the problems.

Around 2018, a new effort was launched with the EU AARC-project: Authentication and Authorisation for Research Collaborations. The AARC project came up with many results, one of them being a blueprint architecture for a solution to easy secure access for research collaboration. The blueprint was meant to make it so that solutions would stand a change of being interoperable.

SRAM is based on international insight in how to solve access problems research collaborations face:

• it is based on the above mentioned AARC-blueprint architecture
• SURF collaborates in and with GÉANT. GÉANT has launched the eduTEAMS service, which shares parts of the software stack with what SURF needs to deliver SRAM. SURF has contracted GÉANT as sub contractor, where GÉANT operates part of the software needed for the SRAM service
• GÉANT takes care of ongoing efforts to advance the AARC results, and is involved in the EOSC project
• the collaboration of SURF with GÉANT means Dutch institutions using SRAM use a state of the art access management system which is poised to become the international standard solution and is positioned well for the EOSC cloud