About the Cybersecurity Architect of the Year category
Who this award is for
This award is for the person who designs how security fits together. Recent nominees include a cloud security architect at a data security vendor, a principal engineer who designed a secure software supply chain platform at a large software company, and a principal security architect at a healthcare technology company.
Describe the design itself and what it made possible. A large design delivered as a single project can also be entered in Cybersecurity Project of the Year, and an architect who leads application security day to day can add Application Security Leader of the Year.
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 — the scope of what the nominee designs and who builds on it: the engineering teams that build to their designs, and the standards and reviews they set.
- Innovation — a design that solves a hard problem, for example zero trust across cloud and on-premises systems, a secure build pipeline or controls that keep working when parts of a cloud system fail.
- Impact — what the architecture changed: systems or users protected, misconfigurations removed, deployments made faster, audits passed. A short description of the design with before-and-after measures tells the story well.
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.
