SC Awards, Identity, Leadership, Threat Management

2025 SC Award winners revealed: Honoring cybersecurity excellence

SAN FRANCISCO — With RSAC 2025 in full swing, cybersecurity industry leaders, builders, and defenders gathered Tuesday to celebrate excellence, innovation, and the winners of the 28th annual SC Awards.

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SC Media is proud to honor the 33 winners of this year’s Excellence and Trust Awards, selected by an independent panel of judges from a highly competitive field of more than 160 finalists and hundreds of nominations.

View the full list of 2025 SC Awards winners here.

This year’s winners reflect a cybersecurity community that’s adaptive, forward-thinking, and unafraid to tackle the tough challenges. From cloud workload protection and zero-trust enforcement to non-human identity management and ransomware resilience, these honorees stand out in a moment when innovation must be practical and trustworthy.

Steve Salinas, Sr. Dir. Product Marketing, Halcyon

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The Excellence and Trust Award categories highlight emerging leaders and familiar powerhouses. In Best Emerging Technology, Torq stood out for its agentic AI automation platform. DataGrail earned recognition for simplifying complex compliance challenges, and Halcyon was honored for its ransomware defense platform — a reminder that prevention and recovery now go hand in hand.

Meanwhile, CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, and Fortinet continued to demonstrate why they remain enterprise mainstays. On the individual front, Kunal Agarwal of dope.security and Marc van Zadelhoff of Mimecast were recognized for leadership that’s both visionary and culturally transformative.

These winners earned their spotlight — but let’s be clear, they were up against a remarkable field. Every entry reminded us just how much heart, hustle, and innovation fuels this industry.

Crowd assembled at SC Media's 2025 SC Awards ceremony as winners are announced.

(Attendees of SC Media's 2025 SC Awards ceremony as winners are announced.)

The 2025 SC Awards ceremony and reception took place Tuesday night at Merkado, just steps from RSAC — a fitting setting to recognize a year defined by urgency, agility, and ingenuity. Winners will be profiled on SC Media and CyberRisk Alliance channels, with interviews captured live from the CyberRisk TV studio at RSAC.

These winners didn’t just defend systems. They made cybersecurity more usable, adaptable, and human.

For the full list of winners, visit SCWorld.com/SC-Awards.

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Tom Spring, Editorial Director

Tom Spring is Editorial Director for SC Media and is based in Boston, MA. For two decades he has worked at national publications in the leadership roles of publisher at Threatpost, executive news editor PCWorld/Macworld and technical editor at CRN. He is a seasoned cybersecurity reporter, editor and storyteller that aims always for truth and clarity.

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