Team Authentic8 was on Friday declared the winner of the Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) and University of the Witwatersrand's (Wits') Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct’s security access management hackathon, also called the Access Management System Challenge.

The announcement was made at a demo day in Braamfontein.

The team delivered a Single Sign On (SSO) solution, built on the OKTA development platform. 

As the winner, team Authentic8 received R150 000 and will now enter the incubation period – a seven-month membership to the Tshimologong Precinct incubation programme to further develop their solution. 

Aimed at streamlining ACSA’s security access, the Access Management System challenge endeavoured to find a unique and impactful security solution using an SSO approach.

Over and above finding a solution for ACSA, the challenge served as a means to identify and build new-generation information technology skills.

As a big organisation, ACSA has multiple systems across all its operations and has hundreds of users. The organisation needs to link user identity to meet security protocols or match the system to the user profile.

The initial briefing session for the challenge took place in January. Participants that attended and understood the challenge and expectations then completed an entry form and uploaded a video clip of their idea.

The top 50 entrants were invited to participate in a three-day bootcamp and hackathon, where they were guided through the process of developing a conceptual prototype and refining their business model.

The top ten ideas were selected from this.

This was followed by a six-week membership to the Tshimologong Precinct pre-incubation programme for the ten participants.

They were each assigned a mentor and given access to a range of facilities, expert advisers and resources.

Participants used this time to develop a working prototype and to refine their business model.

This culminated in the demo day, where two teams – Aunthentic8 and Wakanda – demonstrated their prototypes and pitched their ideas to a panel of judges.