Best Cybersecurity Strategy

This award is for a strategy: the plan an organization made for its security and what happened when it was put into practice. A recent nominee is a technology provider in Saudi Arabia whose five-pillar security strategy underpins its digital transformation work.

The person behind the strategy can also be entered in Cybersecurity Strategist of the Year with a separate nomination about their role. If the strategy is mainly about risk and regulation, add Best Risk and Compliance Program.

Related categories to enter

Each category is judged separately, so you can enter a nominee in every category that fits their work, with a separate nomination for each. Tailor each nomination to that category's focus. Entering several related categories gives the work more than one chance to be recognized.

Cybersecurity Strategist of the Year — to recognize the person who wrote and led the strategy
Chief Information Security Officer of the Year (CISO) — if the strategy is the CISO's program for the whole organization
Best Risk and Compliance Program — if the strategy centers on risk and regulation
Cybersecurity Project of the Year — for one initiative within the strategy
Best Cybersecurity Awareness Program — if changing employee behavior is part of the strategy
Security Program Optimization Leader of the Year — if the strategy's main result is a program that runs better

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 peers in a similar setting and region. Your entry package, any sponsorship and public votes do not affect the jury's scores.

Strong entries in this category show:

Leadership — who owns the strategy, how it was agreed with executives and the board, and how the rest of the organization got behind it.
Innovation — the choice that sets the strategy apart: what it puts first, what it stops doing, and how it deals with new conditions such as AI, cloud or regulation.
Impact — evidence the strategy worked: milestones reached, risks reduced, costs or complexity cut, business goals supported. Set out the starting point, the plan and the results so far.

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

Anyone can submit a nomination: the nominee, a colleague or manager, the organization, or an agency entering a client. The nomination form has a confidential field for detail that is shared with the judges and not published, such as internal figures, customer names or incident details. Deadlines, pricing and entry steps are on the How it Works page.