2026 Community Choice Award Winners Announced
Today, as the cybersecurity community gathers at Black Hat USA in Las Vegas, we are proud to announce the 2026 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards Community Choice winners.
This year’s winners were determined through 79,455 eligible votes recorded across the 2026 awards season.
Community Choice is the only Cybersecurity Excellence Awards honor determined directly by community voting rather than by our awards jury. While the jury awards recognize innovation, impact, and merit through expert evaluation, Community Choice reflects the visible support nominees have earned from customers, colleagues, partners, peers, and the wider cybersecurity community, one social share at a time.
[ Explore all 2026 Community Choice Award winners → ]
Congratulations to every winner, and thank you to all the nominees and community members who participated. Every eligible vote helped recognize the companies, products, services, teams, and professionals shaping the future of cybersecurity.
What the Voting Reveals
Beyond determining the winners, this year’s voting provides a revealing snapshot of where industry attention is focused.
Security operations and managed services, exposure and threat management, and AI security attracted the strongest support across the product and service categories.
These areas reflect several of the most urgent challenges facing security organizations: increasing operational capacity, identifying and reducing exploitable risk, and establishing effective controls as AI becomes more deeply embedded across the enterprise.
AI-related recognition now spans ten award categories, including agentic AI platforms, AI security, and AI governance. Several of these categories did not exist just two award seasons ago, reflecting how quickly AI has moved from an emerging technology to a defining force across cybersecurity.
The concentration of nominees and votes around these areas offers a useful directional signal of how cybersecurity priorities are shifting. Community Choice voting is not a scientific market survey, but the scale of participation provides a meaningful view into where companies, practitioners, partners, and customers are directing their attention and support.
What We Are Exploring Next
Cybersecurity Insiders will continue examining these shifts through upcoming research into how AI is reshaping cybersecurity domains, where enterprise defenses are falling behind, and what organizations are doing to close the resulting gaps.
The research will combine independent industry analysis with select studies developed in collaboration with technology leaders that contribute deep domain expertise and real-world evidence.
[ Explore recent Cybersecurity Insiders research → ]
Looking Ahead to the 2027 Awards
The 2027 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards will continue recognizing the companies, products, services, teams, and professionals helping to advance cybersecurity through distinct jury and Community Choice programs.
If you are interested in participating in the awards program, please register for updates on the 2027 nomination period, categories, eligibility requirements, and award announcements.
[ Get updates about the 2027 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards → ]
Congratulations again to all our 2026 Community Choice winners, and thank you to everyone who helped make this year’s program possible.