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Research and Education Identity Federations have been built to solve a number of problems common to many organisations, from the wish to access multiple services without having to provide tens of different credentials to each user, to being able to define uniform and coherent policies and authorization roles.
Moreover, the need to support research collaborations and to leverage common services for the academia, such as access to scientific journals, lead to the definition and implementation of multi-lateral federations, where the federation acts as a trusted third party that guarantees the respect of common standards and policies among multiple identity and service providers. This is a distinct feature of R&E federations compared to enterprise ones, which are usually composed by one identity provider and multiple services.
R&E federations have come a long way and have even defined a worldwide inter-federation service, eduGAIN, as well as a set of standards for identity assurance, attribute release, security, etc.