SAN FRANCISCO, March 25, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Cybersecurity Insiders today announced the winners of the 2026 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards during RSA Conference, recognizing leading cybersecurity companies, products, and professionals.
This year’s defining theme was AI security, drawing more nominations and more intense competition than any other, with entries spanning AI governance, agentic security, runtime protection, AI-powered threat detection, identity, and data protection.
“A year ago, most AI security nominations centered on governance and acceptable use,” said Holger Schulze, CEO of Cybersecurity Insiders. “This year, we reviewed purpose-built solutions for securing autonomous AI agents, a category that barely existed twelve months ago. The pace of innovation is unlike anything we’ve seen in the program’s history.”
Full results and winner profiles are available at https://cybersecurity-excellence-awards.com/ The awards surfaced a larger question: are enterprise defenses evolving fast enough to keep pace with the speed and complexity of AI-driven change?
To examine this gap, Cybersecurity Insiders is fielding its AI Defense Gap survey during RSA, interviewing more than 150 CISOs and senior security leaders to assess which existing defenses are holding up against advancing AI-driven risk, where they are falling short, and what security leaders believe comes next. Findings will be published shortly after the conference and made available to the cybersecurity community.
“AI went from chatbots to autonomous agents in a year,” Schulze said. “The next shift is toward AI systems orchestrating other AI systems, delegating tasks without human initiation, and optimizing beyond original intent. That is where today’s security architectures hit their limits. The AI Defense Gap survey is designed to measure what holds, what breaks, and what comes next.”
About Cybersecurity Insiders
Cybersecurity Insiders produces independent research based on surveys of cybersecurity leaders and practitioners worldwide, serving a community of 600,000+ security professionals. Its reports reveal where security strategies break down in practice — helping organizations benchmark their maturity, identify capability gaps, and prioritize the actions needed to close them. The Cybersecurity Excellence Awards, now in their second decade, recognize the companies, products, and professionals stepping in to close those gaps.
Contact
Founder Holger Schulze
Cybersecurity Insiders
[email protected]
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/968ecbe5-bea0-4345-b9e8-93fe95508871
