About the Secret and Credential Management category
What belongs in this category
The Secret and Credential Management category covers products that keep application secrets out of code and configuration files and deliver them safely when needed. Typical entries provide a secrets vault for applications, build pipelines and cloud workloads, issue short-lived credentials, rotate secrets automatically, and scan code repositories and collaboration tools for secrets that have leaked.
Vaulting passwords for people fits Password Management, and administrator credentials belong in Privileged Access Management (PAM). Protecting and governing service accounts and tokens as identities fits Non-Human Identity (NHI) Security and Non-Human Identity Management.
Related categories to enter
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.
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 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:
- Leadership — trust in demanding environments: secrets and applications managed, development teams and pipelines served, regulated customers.
- Innovation — a secrets problem solved in a new way, such as short-lived credentials that remove stored secrets, rotation without changes to applications, or finding secrets in chat and ticket tools as well as code.
- Impact — results for customers: secrets removed from code, leaked secrets found and rotated, time to rotate, incidents from exposed keys avoided. Give before-and-after figures.
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
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.
