Ca’ Foscari University of Venice has adopted eduVPN for its remote-access service, improving security, ease of use and federated integration. Stefano Claut, System Administrator at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice told us more.
In recent years, at Ca’ Foscari we have faced the need to rethink our VPN (Virtual Private Network) service. The existing solution, created many years ago mainly to enable access to library resources, had become difficult to manage over time. User profiles had multiplied without a centralised control, configurations were complex and fragmented, and there was no effective integration with multi-factor authentication.
Moreover, the VPN relied on dedicated hardware appliances, deployed across two data centres—an approach that proved inflexible and costly in terms of management and maintenance. This made the infrastructure poorly suited to modern requirements for security, scalability and service continuity, creating difficulties both for users and for the technical team. The service also had to support a large user base: the university has around 30,000 active accounts, all enabled to use the VPN, with varied profiles and needs.
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice has adopted eduVPN, the international service developed by the research and education networking community, to support secure and easy to use remote access to university resources.
At the end of 2023 we carried out an in-depth analysis of the usage profiles that were genuinely needed, with the aim of identifying a solution fully integrated with our digital ecosystem. The choice fell on eduVPN Institute Access, a service initially conceived in the Netherlands by SURF, now developed under the Commons Conservancy by a wider collaboration in the research and education community and as part of the pan-European GÉANT project. In Italy, the service is managed by GARR.
For us, this was a decisive factor: being able to rely on a service designed for the global research and education community and supported nationally within the GARR network represented significant added value.
Native integration with Single Sign-On (in our case Shibboleth) made it possible to automatically inherit multi-factor authentication, access via SPID (the Italian Public Digital Identity System) and CIE (the Italian Electronic Identity Card), and attribute-based profile management. All of this happens transparently, without requiring users to deal with complex configurations or manual steps. The adoption of eduVPN therefore greatly simplified internal management, reducing operational time and costs and improving the overall user experience.
A simple, immediate experience
We believe that one of eduVPN’s main strengths is its ease of use. Clients are available from the official stores for all platforms and do not require manual configuration. Users simply select their institution and the rest happens automatically. This simplicity has virtually eliminated support requests caused by incorrect configuration, bringing immediate benefits both for users and for the IT support team.
From a technical standpoint, we adopted WireGuard, which delivers high performance and reliability even under sub-optimal network conditions or in environments subject to geographical restrictions. Where providers restrict UDP traffic, users can switch to TCP directly from the client, ensuring service continuity in any situation.
A gradual migration path
Our adoption process was planned and phased. For around six months we kept both the old VPN and eduVPN active. All the instructions we published on the website referred only to the new installation, and all new users started directly with eduVPN, making the transition easier. This approach enabled a smooth migration with no service interruption, minimising manual intervention.
We deployed eduVPN on a single virtual machine, integrating it into the university’s standard VM management processes, including updates, backups, disaster recovery and logging. This removed the complexity of the old physical appliances and significantly simplified service management, making it more scalable and easier to extend to future needs.
It was crucial to be able to rely on a service designed for the global research community and supported nationally by GARR.
The service is currently delivered from an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS virtual machine with 4 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM—more than adequate to support an average daily load of around 250 concurrent users, while leaving ample room for growth. The solution is designed to scale easily across multiple VMs to provide higher availability and better performance. Its efficiency has also made it possible to significantly reduce the resources required compared with the previous solution based on dedicated appliances.
Tangible benefits for users
Today, eduVPN is the sole remote-access system at Ca’ Foscari University and it is used across the entire institutional community. Students use it to access library resources; lecturers and researchers use it to connect to workstations, clusters and scientific tools; while access for external technicians or to IoT devices is authorised through specific, on-request profiles. The service has delivered numerous benefits, including improved security and privacy thanks to protected access and centralised user management with multi-factor authentication. It also ensured service continuity, enabling work away from campus, during trips, or during international experiences such as Erasmus. Finally, it made management simpler, reducing complexity through integration with the university’s digital infrastructure.
For Ca’ Foscari, the adoption of eduVPN was not merely a technical upgrade, but also an important change that has made remote access more secure for the entire academic community. Thanks to integration with the university’s digital systems and the support of the GARR network, the service is now a key element in modernising the IT infrastructure.
The result is an environment that is easy to manage and ready to evolve, where students, researchers and internal staff can rely on a simple, uninterrupted user experience.
This case study was originally published in the latest issue of GARR NEWS, the magazine of the Italian Research and Education Network GARR. You can read the full magazine (in Italian) at: https://www.garrnews.it/