The European Identity & Cloud Awards 2013 were presented tonight by the analyst group KuppingerCole at the seventh European Identity & Cloud Conference. This award is honoring outstanding projects and initiatives in Identity & Access Management (IAM), Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC), and Cloud Security. Numerous projects have been nominated by vendors and end-user companies during the last 12 months. Winners have been chosen by KuppingerCole analysts among the most outstanding examples of applications and ideas in the areas of IAM, GRC, and Cloud security. Additionally, four Special Awards and the Lifetime Achievement Award have been given.

In the category “Best Identity and Access Management Project”, the award goes to Virgin Media for the implementation of highly polished access control mechanisms with IAM technologies for the WiFi network of the London Underground metro system. This project went live for the 2012 Summer Olympics and had to meet very demanding requirements for high performance user authentication.

In the category “Best Access Governance and Intelligence Project” two awards have been presented to Deutsche Bank AG and Swiss Reinsurance Company Ltd. Both companies have developed outstanding projects in the Access Governance field. Deutsche Bank AG has implemented complex access rules across the borders of business units, thus taking the leading role in the worldwide financial industry. Swiss Re has implemented a complete infrastructure for dynamic access permissions management, an important milestone in their architecture.

The award for the “Best Cloud Security Project” went to Evry ASA for their multitenant IAM infrastructure in the cloud with an impressively sophisticated security model, which, among other mechanisms, also supports authentication with national ID cards.

In the “Best Approach on improving Governance and mitigating Risks” category, the award has been presented to UKH (University Hospital) Hamburg-Eppendorf. They have protected their internal PC systems from unauthorized privileged access, while ensuring that IT service operators can still easily access the systems for support tasks. The project has provided massive improvements in sensitive data protection.

OAuth 2.0 has received the award in the “Best Innovation/New Standard in Information Security”. OAuth 2.0 is the most important new standard in the IAM field, which already enjoys broad recognition and support by the leading vendors on the market.

This year, the “Lifetime Achievement” award has been presented again, and this time it went to Kim Cameron, who has greatly contributed to the Identity Management field with his “Seven Laws of Identity” and who continues to shape the IAM field with new ideas.

Finally, four special awards have been presented.

A special award “Bridging the Organizational Gap between Business and IT” has been presented to Volkswagen Financial Services. VWFS AG has developed an outstanding and exemplary approach to the organizational structure for their Access and Identity Management Program, thus ensuring their business/IT alignment.

Another special award for “Rapid and Lean Implementation of IAM/IAG” went to E.ON Global Commodities. Their impressive Access Governance project demonstrates the possibility to implement IAM projects quickly in the most complicated application environments.

A special “Rapid Re-design and Re-implementation of the entire IAM” award has been presented to Schindler Informatik AG. This company has not only built an identity provisioning infrastructure for their project, but also performed a client migration to the new Windows version and restructuring of their Microsoft Active directory, working on several complex projects in parallel. At the same time, their HR has been standardized, forming a reliable information source for their IAM.

Finally, HypoVereinsbank has been awarded for their “Integration of Provisioning and Access Governance in a Complex Banking Environment” project for its business focus, global scale and groundbreaking approach to efficient onboarding of business applications.