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Today, as the cybersecurity community gathers at Black Hat USA in Las Vegas, we are proud to announce the 2026 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards Community Choice winners. This year’s winners were determined through 79,455 eligible votes recorded across the 2026 awards season. Community Choice is the only Cybersecurity Excellence Awards honor determined directly by community voting rather than by our awards jury. While the jury awards recognize innovation, impact, and merit through expert evaluation, Community Choice reflects the visible support nominees have earned from customers, colleagues, partners, peers, and the wider cybersecurity community, one social share at a time. [ Explore all 2026 Community Choice Award winners → ] Congratulations to every winner, and thank you to all the nominees and community members who participated. Every eligible vote helped recognize the companies, products, services, teams, and professionals shaping the future of cybersecurity. …

We have reviewed thousands of nominations over the past decade. The ones that win share a common pattern — and it has nothing to do with length, polish, or marketing language. It comes down to clarity, proof, and category fit. This guide applies whether you're nominating a product, a company, an industry solution, a professional, or a team. The principles are the same. One thing runs through everything below: relevance to your category. The strongest outcome, the most impressive technical approach, the most compelling trust story — none of it lands if it doesn't connect to what the category is designed to recognize. Before you write a single word, ask yourself: does this evidence speak directly to the category I'm entering? If it doesn't, it's noise — no matter how impressive it is on its own. Here's what our judges actually look for, and how to present it to them: Start with the situation or challenge, not the background The strongest nominations open with specifics…

We reviewed the first 200+ submissions for the 2026 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards ahead of RSA Conference 2026, looking for themes across categories. Noticeable is a shift away from broad AI positioning and toward governance frameworks, identity architecture, and measurable accountability. Agentic AI categories are among the fastest-growing in the 2026 program. Autonomous systems are moving from pilot to production faster than governance frameworks can keep pace, which is widening the gap between AI adoption and enterprise security readiness. In the nominations, that tension shows up in practical terms: concerns about shadow AI deployments operating outside security oversight, agents taking actions without clear authorization boundaries, and unpredictable behavior when autonomy outstrips guardrails. These patterns also mirror what we are seeing across Cybersecurity Insiders’ independent research portfolio, including the 2026 CISO AI Risk Report, the 2026 Cloud Security …