About the Best Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) category
Who this award is for
This award is for a provider that runs security operations for clients as an ongoing service: monitoring, detection and response, or management of security controls. Recent winners include a global managed detection and response provider, a European provider serving regulated and critical infrastructure environments, a provider in Greater China that delivers managed security together with network connectivity, and a provider that runs a 24-hour security operations center for small and mid-sized businesses.
Describe the service as clients experience it: what you monitor, how quickly you respond and which tasks you take over from them. Any managed security provider can also enter Cybersecurity Service Provider of the Year, the broad services award, and the team that runs the service can enter SOC Team of the Year. The managed service itself can be entered in Managed Security Service or Managed Detection and Response (MDR).
Related categories to enter
Each category is judged separately, so you can enter a company in every category that fits, with a separate nomination for each. Tailor each nomination to that category's focus. Entering several related categories gives the company more than one chance to be recognized.
How entries are judged
An independent jury of security practitioners, analysts and CISOs scores each nomination on leadership, innovation and impact. Each nomination competes in its category against organizations of similar size and region, so a mid-sized firm is not ranked against a global enterprise. Your entry package, any sponsorship and public votes do not affect the jury's scores.
Strong entries in this category show:
- Leadership — the scale and reach of the service: clients and sectors covered, hours of operation, operations centers, certifications held.
- Innovation — how the service is run, such as automation or AI in alert handling, detection rules the provider writes itself, or one service that covers cloud, identity and industrial systems.
- Impact — service results: time to detect and respond, incidents contained, false alerts reduced, service levels met, clients retained. Give averages across clients and one case in detail.
The jury awards Gold, Silver or Bronze, or a Finalist badge, and results are published on this site and announced to the 600,000+ member Cybersecurity Insiders community. Every approved nomination also enters the separate Community Choice award, decided by public votes.
How to enter
A company can nominate itself, or someone else can nominate it, for example a PR or marketing agency entering a client. The nomination form has a confidential field for detail that is shared with the judges and not published, such as revenue figures, customer names or funding terms. Deadlines, pricing and entry steps are on the How it Works page.
