Nominations are open • Enter by February 27, 2027 • Time left: Start a nomination
Award categoryCybersecurity Product / Service
The Cybersecurity Excellence Awards recognize products that control what data AI systems can use and expose. The category covers training data, the content that assistants and agents retrieve, and what they reveal in answers.
Nominations are open
Enter this category by February 27, 2027. Anyone can submit an entry: the company, the nominee, a colleague or an agency.
The AI Data Security and Governance category is about securing AI through its data. AI assistants and agents can surface any file they can reach, so a user may receive salary data or customer records they should never see. Typical entries classify the data AI systems can read, fix overly broad sharing before an assistant goes live, control which sources feed training and retrieval, and track what sensitive data appears in AI outputs.
This category covers data on its way into and out of AI. Controlling what staff paste into public AI tools fits AI Usage Control, and protecting live AI applications from attack fits AI Application and Runtime Security. AI used to classify and protect an organization's data, rather than to secure AI, fits AI-Assisted Data Protection. Products that secure data across the whole organization fit Data Security or Data Security Posture Management (DSPM). As with all categories for securing AI, an entry here can be repeated in Security for AI.
Each category is judged separately, so you can enter a product in every category that matches what it does, with a separate nomination for each. Tailor each nomination to that category's focus. Entering several related categories gives the product more than one chance to be recognized.
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:
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.
A vendor can enter its own product or service, and a PR agency can enter it on a client's behalf. The nomination form has a confidential field for detail that is shared with the judges and not published, such as customer names, deployment figures or roadmap. Deadlines, pricing and entry steps are on the How it Works page.