Nominations are open • Enter by February 27, 2027 • Time left: Start a nomination
Award categoryCybersecurity Product / Service
The Cybersecurity Excellence Awards recognize products that issue and protect the cryptographic identities machines use to trust each other. The category covers certificates, keys and identity credentials for running software (workloads).
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 Machine Identity Security category covers products that give servers, devices, containers and workloads cryptographic identities and keep them safe. Typical entries issue and manage certificates and keys at scale, provide workload identity for services that talk to each other, protect private keys, and prepare machine identities for shorter certificate lifetimes and post-quantum algorithms.
Managing certificate lifecycles as the main job fits Certificate Lifecycle Management, and running certificate authorities fits Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). A product entered in either can enter here as well. Service accounts, API keys and access tokens, the credentials software uses to call other services, belong in Non-Human Identity (NHI) Security and Non-Human Identity Management.
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.