A new private cloud being built by Deutsche Bank has won the Open Data Center Alliance’s Conquering the Cloud competition.

The German financial instituion’s internal infrastructure-as-a-service platform, called the Ultra Low Cost Developer Service, is built inside a shipping container. The intial hardware comprises four server racks, and has the potential to host up to 2,000 virtual machines.

The key innovation of the platform is its integration with the bank’s Active Directory identity management system. This allows system administrators to manage the access rights of individual developers with a minimum of effort.

“This is a huge aid to reducing the system administrator overhead,” wrote lead cloud architect Alistair McLaurin in Deutsche Bank’s competition submission. “The fact that users have one centrally managed account for all systems means that only one account needs to be disabled when they leave. For audit log monitoring, one single identity means a user’s activity can be easily tracked across many systems, even short lived virtual machines.”

The system has “exposed new ways of working that are far more than simple cost reduction and have given us insights into how to offer both the flexible production environment of the future and the best employee and developer experience”, he wrote.

The competition judges said that Deutsche Bank’s entry “not only demonstrates true innovation, but also provides a clear and concise approach to deploy and measure cloud success. Most importantly, we feel these practices can be emulated by other organizations looking to implement effective cloud computing solutions.”

Other organisations commended for their cloud projects were China Telecom and the government of Peru.