Intelligent Waves’ EPCE Wins Gold in 2026 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards. Highlights a secure mission-partner collaboration for contested environments. RESTON, VA, UNITED STATES, March 26, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Intelligent Waves announced that its Ephemeral Partner Collaboration Environment, EPCE, received Gold in the Secure Collaboration Platform category in the 2026 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards, a recognition that underscores the company’s focus on secure, mission-ready collaboration for defense and intelligence environments. Intelligent Waves’ EPCE was recognized for addressing a growing operational challenge across modern missions: How to enable secure, rapid collaboration among distributed mission partners when communications are contested, infrastructure is limited, and the risk of exposure is high. Built for coalition and operational environments, EPCE provides an ephemeral, zero-trust collaboration capability that helps users quickly establish secure enclaves without relying on static infrastructure or traditional enterprise collaboration models. The platform incorporates identity-based controls, continuous authentication, just-in-time and just-enough access policies, and integrated multi-path encrypted transport across SATCOM, LTE, and ISP pathways. “Today’s mission environment demands more than secure communications. It requires trusted collaboration at speed,” said Tony Crescenzo, CEO of Intelligent Waves. “EPCE was designed to help mission partners connect, share, and act with confidence in environments where cyber risk, operational pressure, and degraded conditions are the norm.” Marqus Hutchinson, Intelligent Waves’ Chief Technology Officer, added: “EPCE can deploy secure collaboration enclaves in under two hours, eliminate endpoint data persistence, reduce hardware-associated attack surface, and improve interoperability across mission partners while supporting faster decision-making in high-risk environments. The recognition is particularly relevant as defense organizations continue to prioritize secure partner collaboration to support CJADC2, the Mission Partner Environment, and Agile Combat Employment objectives. In those settings, the ability to create a trusted shared environment without leaving behind a large technical footprint is becoming increasingly important. Rather than adapting commercial collaboration tools for operational