Thought Leadership
The IT Verlag honored outstanding innovations and achievements in seven newly defined categories at the IT Security Awards 2026. The awards ceremony took place on October 27 during the it-sa IT security trade show in Nuremberg, Germany. The awards are celebrating their 20th anniversary this year.
The winners in all seven categories have now been announced:
The Seven Award Categories at a Glance
As part of this year’s relaunch, IT Verlag restructured the award categories to eliminate overlap and reflect current developments, including AI agents and regulatory requirements such as NIS2 and DORA.
1. AI & Autonomous Security
- Explainable AI (XAI): Focus on making AI-driven security decisions transparent, traceable, and auditable.
- AI-driven Threat Response: Automated, AI-powered countermeasures that defend against attacks within milliseconds.
- Adversarial AI Defense: Protection against manipulation and data poisoning, along with proactive hardening of AI models.
2. Infrastructure & Cloud Security
- Hybrid & Cloud-native: Workload protection across dynamic multicloud environments.
- Modern Networking: SASE, microsegmentation, and software-defined perimeters.
- DevSecOps: Security as code integrated into CI/CD pipelines.
3. Identity & Zero Trust Security
- Modern IAM & PAM: Securing identities for people, machines, and service accounts.
- Zero Trust Architecture: Continuous verification instead of implicit trust within the network.
- Identity Governance: Automated management of access rights and role lifecycles.
4. Data, Application & API Security
- API Governance & Lifecycle: Comprehensive API management and security from development through end of life.
- Data Security Posture Management (DSPM): Protecting sensitive information across data centers and cloud environments.
- Application Security: Protecting modern web applications and microservices against the OWASP Top 10 and beyond.
5. Detection, Response & Security Operations
- SOC & MDR Innovation: Advanced approaches to threat detection and managed security services.
- XDR & Unified Operations: Bringing isolated security data together to accelerate incident response.
- Threat Intelligence: Using attacker intelligence proactively to prepare and strengthen defenses.
6. GRC & Strategy
- Regulatory Automation: Automating compliance with NIS2, DORA, and other frameworks.
- Risk Quantification: Using mathematically grounded methods to assess IT risks in business terms.
- Security Culture: Strategies for strengthening security awareness throughout the organization.
7. Cyber Resilience & Business Continuity
- Supply Chain Resilience: Protecting and monitoring software and hardware supply chains against third-party risks.
- Incident & Recovery: Rapid incident containment and reliable recovery using measures such as immutable backups.
- Operational Survivability: Maintaining critical business processes even during an ongoing attack.
A Closer Look at the Winning Solutions
As attackers increasingly use AI to exploit vulnerabilities in hours rather than weeks, traditional defenses are no longer enough. That is where the IT Security Awards 2026 come in. This year, the it-daily.net editorial team reviewed more than 100 submissions from established vendors and emerging startups, evaluating them across seven newly structured categories. The awards cover everything from AI-powered threat prevention and identity and cloud security to governance and cyber resilience.
Entries were assessed against a transparent set of criteria covering innovation, practical value and return on investment (ROI), market relevance, sales and partner readiness, and long-term viability. Innovation carried the greatest weight in the evaluation. After all, the awards are designed to recognize the most innovative solutions, not simply the biggest vendors. Here are the winners in each of the seven categories.
AI & Autonomous Security
Winner: Cato Networks | Cato Agentic Threat Prevention
Cato Networks took the top honor in the new flagship category, AI & Autonomous Security. Cato Agentic Threat Prevention is fully integrated into the vendor’s cloud-native SASE platform, which Gartner names a Leader in its latest Magic Quadrant for SASE Platforms.
Rather than waiting for attacks to occur, autonomous AI agents predict likely attack paths and automatically adapt security measures to each customer’s environment. These protections are enforced across every Cato point of presence, without service chaining or detection gaps.
According to Cato, the solution has achieved a leading result in Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) mitigation. The time required to protect against newly disclosed vulnerabilities is reportedly down to around 45 minutes. The jury was particularly impressed by Cato’s approach to predictive security. Rather than adding AI as a standalone feature, the company has integrated it into an established network security architecture that is already a market leader.
Infrastructure & Cloud Security
Winner: Wiz | Cloud Security Graph / CNAPP
Wiz won the Infrastructure & Cloud Security category. Founded in 2020, the company has helped shape the cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) market with its agentless Cloud Security Graph. Instead of requiring software to be installed on every workload, Wiz correlates vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, identities, and network paths across cloud environments. The result is a prioritized risk picture spanning platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
The significance of this approach for the broader industry became particularly clear in March 2026, when Google completed its acquisition of Wiz for USD 32 billion, the largest acquisition in the history of the cybersecurity market to date. Wiz remains an independent brand and is becoming part of Google Cloud, bringing its multicloud approach with it. For the jury, the acquisition provided further evidence that the Cloud Security Graph has become a benchmark for modern cloud security.
Identity & Zero Trust Security
Winner: Palo Alto Networks / Idira | PAM, Identity Security, Machine Identity
Idira, formerly CyberArk and part of Palo Alto Networks since 2026, won the Identity & Zero Trust Security category. The company has long been a benchmark in privileged access management (PAM). Its portfolio has evolved beyond securing traditional human administrator accounts into a comprehensive identity security platform that also covers machine identities, service accounts, and increasingly, AI agents.
The latter was a decisive factor for the jury. As organizations equip more autonomous processes and AI agents with their own access privileges, the number of nonhuman identities is growing faster than the workforce. Idira addresses this gap, backed by an established sales and partner organization built up over many years.
Visit Palo Alto Networks / Idira
Data, Application & API Security
Winner: Cyera | AI-powered Data Security Platform / DSPM
Cyera won the Data, Application & API Security category. The company specializes in Data Security Posture Management (DSPM). Its platform automatically discovers and classifies sensitive data across cloud environments, SaaS applications, and AI workloads. It then assesses associated risks and closes access and configuration gaps before sensitive information can be exposed or leaked.
The jury was persuaded by Cyera’s decision to make DSPM a dedicated core capability rather than a secondary feature within a broader security platform. In a market where sensitive data is increasingly distributed across a growing range of cloud and AI services, the company’s focused approach stood out against broader platforms that offer DSPM merely as an add-on module.
Detection, Response & Security Operations
Winner: CrowdStrike | AI-native Security Platform
CrowdStrike took home the award in the Detection, Response & Security Operations category. The Falcon platform has evolved from endpoint protection into a fully AI-native security platform. It correlates telemetry from endpoints, cloud environments, identities, and networks in real time, helping security teams move beyond alert overload toward a more proactive defensive posture.
The jury selected CrowdStrike as the overall winner in this particularly competitive category for more than just the technological maturity of its platform. The field also included specialized challengers in the agentic security operations center (SOC) space, such as Exaforce, 7AI, and Dropzone AI. CrowdStrike also stood out for combining innovation with global scalability to a degree few other vendors can match.
Governance, Risk, Compliance (GRC) & Strategy
Winner: Vanta | Automated Security & Compliance
Vanta impressed the jury in the Governance, Risk, Compliance (GRC) & Strategy category. Its platform automates tasks that can otherwise consume weeks of manual evidence collection for compliance teams. It continuously monitors controls in real time, automatically gathers evidence from connected systems, and helps organizations remain audit-ready for frameworks such as NIS2, DORA, ISO 27001, and SOC 2.
The solution stood out in the category’s Regulatory Automation subcategory. Rather than merely documenting governance requirements, Vanta turns regulatory obligations into an ongoing, largely automated process. The platform demonstrates how organizations can manage growing compliance demands under NIS2 and DORA more effectively in practice.
Cyber Resilience & Business Continuity
Winner: Rubrik | Cyber Recovery / Zero Trust Data Security
Rubrik won the Cyber Resilience & Business Continuity category. The company has evolved from a traditional backup provider into a cyber recovery specialist built around Zero Trust principles. Its approach combines immutable, isolated data copies, automated anomaly detection during backup operations, and a recovery process explicitly designed for ransomware incidents. The focus extends beyond recovering accidentally deleted files to restoring operations after a serious cyberattack.
For the jury, the decisive factor was Rubrik’s consistent treatment of cyber resilience as a security discipline rather than merely an IT operations task. This approach helped the company stand out in a highly competitive field of established backup and recovery providers.
