About the Cybersecurity Professional of the Year category
Who this award is for
This is the broad award for individual security practitioners. Recent nominees include identity and access engineers, penetration testers, researchers, cloud and application security engineers and GRC leads, at global enterprises, vendors, consultancies and small firms alike.
The award recognizes what the nominee personally delivered, not their job title or seniority. It goes to one named person; for results delivered by a group, enter Cybersecurity Team of the Year. Many nominees enter this category alongside the specialist category that matches their role, such as Cybersecurity Architect of the Year, Cybersecurity Consultant of the Year or Application Security Leader of the Year. People in their first years in the field can also enter Junior Cybersecurity Professional 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 is responsible for, such as the systems, users or clients their work protects, and how colleagues rely on them, whether they own a program, lead others or mentor.
- Innovation — something the nominee built or changed rather than maintained: an architecture, a detection, a tool, a process or published research.
- Impact — measured results: incidents prevented or contained, vulnerabilities fixed, access risk removed, time or cost saved. Concrete results with numbers say more than a list of certifications and job duties.
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.
