AIRTO members Jisc and NPL have signed a partnership aimed at delivering resilient, precise time services to institutions over Janet, the UK’s national research and education network (NREN).
Traceable to the UK’s national time scale, UTC(NPL), the NPLTime Access® service offers users a time signal over fibre-optic links that are traceable to UTC(NPL), not dependent on GNSS. Making this service available via Janet will provide researchers access to a trusted ‘common clock’ with an accurate and resilient time signal, traceable to the UK’s national timescale.
The integration of NPLTime Access® would extend and strengthen the existing Jisc network time service, which currently synchronises the computer clock times of managed devices connected to an institution’s IP network to within a few milliseconds of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). With future accuracy requirements narrowing to just microseconds, Jisc and NPL are working on how best to meet the needs of the sector.
Maintaining a more consistent time reference between infrastructures also improves cyber resilience by enabling security teams to manage and protect their networks more efficiently.
