The European Identity Award 2011 honoring outstanding projects and initiatives in Identity Management was presented on Wednesday by the analyst group KuppingerCole at their annual event, the European Identity Conference 2011 in Munich. Winners were chosen from a shortlist of exemplary projects and initiatives compiled by the analysts at KuppingerCole during the last 12 months. Award winners have all distinguished themselves through exceptional efforts in Identity and Access Management (IAM), Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC), and Cloud Security.

The European Identity Award highlights implementations and programs that the analysts of KuppingerCole believe have the potential to advance the awareness for and business value of digital identity in the context of business and commerce.

In the category Cloud Provider Offerings the winner is WSO2 for providing a multi-tenant Identity as a Cloud Service with OpenID and XACML support, build on an open-source platform, with several innovative features and migrating an on-premise solution to a full cloud service.

The award for the best On-Premise to Cloud Migration is gone to NHS Trust/King’s College London for their NHS Infrastructure providing a secure infrastructure for researchers in the cloud to store and share data while protecting against data loss.

As best Identity & Access Management project the award was given to BrokerGate, a Swiss solution working as a Secure Federation Broker for insurance brokers to manage federations instead of all the users, thus reducing the administrative workload and increasing security.

A special award for Integrated Identity & Access Management, a key topic of this year’s EIC, gone to Telefonica O2 Czech Republic for their successful deployment of a large scale IAM implementation covering provisioning, SSO, Audit, efficient application on-boarding, and more.

As best GRC (Governance, Risk Management & Compliance) project the BT Managed Fraud Service has been selected, a shared service providing real-time assessment of online transactions and analyzing fraud.

In the category Privacy the winners are Qiy and connect.me, delivering Innovative approaches to manage the personal identity in the Internet.

Two awards were granted in the category Identity-related eGovernment projects. One goes to Postecom for their CECPAC project, a certified, free mail platform open to all Italian Citizens for their communications with Public Administrations. The other goes to tunnistus.fi and the KATSO consortium for their Government to Citizen/Business services established in Finland, now used by more than 70% of the Finnish companies.

The award for the most influential standardization effort goes to OASIS and the XACML TC (Technical Committee) for the work on XACML 3.0, an important standard driving the externalization of security out of application for centralized management and control.

Finally, there is another special award for the best project around entitlement management and the externalization of security out of applications, given to the State of California for a service which manages authentication and authorization centrally for the Tax Service and a large number of applications, based on a central entitlement management system and XACML 3.0.