About the Privacy and Security Leader of the Year category
Who this award is for
This award is for people whose job covers both privacy and security. One past nominee is the security and privacy lead for a new secure access service at a large software company, who set up a security and privacy engineering team and monitoring built to protect customer data.
Show both sides in your entry: how personal data is governed and how it is secured. A nominee whose role is mostly regulatory can also enter Cybersecurity Compliance and Assurance Professional of the Year, and a company-wide privacy and compliance effort can be entered in 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.
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 — how the nominee gets legal, security, engineering and product teams to agree on how personal data is handled, and the decisions those teams now make together.
- Innovation — privacy and security built into product development: privacy reviews before launch, collecting less data by design, or tooling that finds, classifies and restricts access to personal data.
- Impact — what improved for the people whose data is held and for the organization: data mapped and reduced, access to personal data restricted and monitored, requests handled faster, breaches and regulatory findings avoided, new products or markets cleared to launch.
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.
