​Peer Awards gala to honor cyber leaders who embody Respect, Inclusion, Collaboration, Community, Innovation and Education

​About this event

​Sponsored by Portal26, the Champion in Security Awards will be held at RSAC 2024, for the second year in a row, to honor security leaders who embody certain values that make the security community and profession better for current and future practitioners. These awards seek to foster values that go far beyond the practice of security techniques and focus instead on the humans that power this critical discipline and without whom we would not have the strength to stand up to cybercriminals.

​Opening Keynote: Sylvia Acevedo, Board of Directors, Qualcomm, Frmr CEO, Girl Scouts of America, Author, Speaker

​Champions in Security Awards Keynote: Troy WIlkinson, Global CISO, IPG

​Awards Ceremony: Champion in Security Awards for Respect, Inclusion, Innovation, Collaboration, Community, and Future Generation.

​Awards will be given to CISOs and senior security leaders in each category who embody the most important human values in our community. Each award category will be preceded by a short keynote by a security luminary.

​Attire: Business Formal

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​Champion in Security: Respect

​The Champion in Security Award for Respect honors the security leaders who foster kind and respectful behavior within their organizations as well as in forums, industry groups, and security events. These individuals use their seniority and visibility to set an example for others and create meaningful rewards for kind and empathetic responses to challenging work scenarios.

​Champion in Security: Collaboration

​The Champion in Security Award for Collaboration honors the security leaders who believe in stronger security through information sharing and collaboration. These leaders participate in peer groups that exchange security intelligence, share best practices, collaborate on common frameworks, disclose positive or negative experiences, and, most importantly, provide their peers with an inside look into their own challenges as well as solutions that have worked. These leaders believe that in order to beat one of us, attackers have to beat all of us.

​Champion in Security: Inclusion

​The Champion in Security Award for Inclusion honors the security leaders who organize their teams to accommodate diversity, equality, and inclusion principles to the fullest degree. These individuals actively solicit individuals from diverse as well as underrepresented groups and provide training to overcome barriers to equitable progress. These leaders recognize that as a community of practitioners, security has historically not been very diverse, and so they work hard to bring about significant change in how their teams are staffed and also to ensure that individuals from diverse backgrounds are welcomed, trained, and rewarded in a fair and equitable manner.

​Champion in Security: Innovation

​The Champion in Security Award for Innovation honors the security leaders who understand that new ideas and innovation require sponsorship and safe spaces. These leaders actively seek out innovative ideas and provide air cover for their nurturing and development. These individuals support innovation by creating real-world feedback loops that help innovative ideas turn into practical solutions that can be deployed in the real world to address important security challenges.

​Champion in Security: Community

​The Champion in Security Award for Community honors the security leaders who contribute meaningful efforts towards bringing practitioners together. These individuals give their valuable time to build peer networks that become valuable sources of information, solutions to common problems, innovations, and support for the broader cybersecurity ecosystem. They create strong and much-needed support systems for what is arguably among the hardest jobs in the enterprise.

​Champion in Security: Education

​The Champion in Security Award for Education honors the security leaders who recognize that young people live in a world fraught with far more cyber risk than prior generations and seek to inform and educate this generation on safety in the digital realm. These individuals create meaningful programs that offer hands-on training and education at schools and colleges. These individuals are either young people actively involved in cybersecurity or leaders fostering the inclusion of the younger generation.