Skip to content
CIS Excellence AwardsEst. 2018 · San Francisco
Volume IX · The 2026 Cycle

The Table of Contents for the 2026 Cycle.

Twenty-two categories. Five families. One independent judging body. Submissions are now open through 14 March 2026.

Open 14 Jan 2026
Closes 14 Mar 2026
Finalists announced 12 May 2026
Submit Your Entry for 2026 Browse the Five Families
The Taxonomy

Twenty-two categories is not a marketing count. It is a coverage statement.

The CIS Excellence Awards recognizes work across the full surface of Customer Identity & Access Management — not as a sub-bucket inside a generic cybersecurity prize, but as its own discipline with five distinct families. Each category exists because the program has seen, judged, and benchmarked enough submissions in that area to defend a separate rubric.

Every finalist — and every winner — is independently scored against the CIS Excellence Framework, a 142-criterion maturity model built by the program's analyst founders and currently used by Gartner as a reference. The framework is what prevents vendor sponsorships from drifting into outcomes: the criteria are public, the scoring weights are published, and the 41-member judging panel is audited annually for independence.

Five families · 22 categories · 142 criteria · one independent panel.

The Five Families

Five editorial desks, twenty-two categories, one discipline.

Each family clusters the work of a distinct IAM discipline. Choose the desk that matches your program; the categories below it will define the submission.

I

Customer Identity & Access Management

The public-facing surface of identity — registration, login, consent, and account recovery for the customer population. The largest family by submission volume and the program's original focus.

  • Best CIAM Deployment — Enterprise
  • Best CIAM Deployment — Mid-Market
  • Best CIAM Migration & Consolidation
  • Best Customer Login & Registration Experience
  • Best Consent & Preference Management
  • Best Account Recovery & Fraud Resistance

2024 winner: Okta for Customer Identity Cloud — subsequently cited in 14 enterprise RFP shortlists.

II

Workforce IAM

Identity for the people you employ — joiners, movers, leavers, and the governance that surrounds them.

  • Best Workforce IAM Deployment
  • Best Identity Governance & Administration
  • Best SSO & Federation Program
  • Best HR-Driven Provisioning
III

Privileged Access

The small set of credentials that, if compromised, end the engagement. Vaulting, just-in-time elevation, session recording.

  • Best Privileged Access Management Deployment
  • Best Just-in-Time Elevation Program
  • Best PAM for Cloud & Hybrid Infrastructure
IV

Decentralized Identity

Verifiable credentials, self-sovereign identity, and the wallet-and-issuer models reshaping consumer trust.

  • Best Verifiable Credentials Deployment
  • Best Decentralized Identifier Program
  • Best Identity Wallet Implementation
V

Identity Threat Detection & Response

The newest family, and the fastest-growing. Identity has become the attack surface; this family recognizes the teams detecting, containing, and remediating identity-driven compromise.

  • Best Identity Threat Detection Deployment
  • Best Identity-Led Incident Response
  • Best Identity Posture Management
  • Best Adversarial Identity Testing Program

2024 winner: BeyondTrust Identity Security Platform.

Submission Reference

Before you choose a category, read this once.

Eligibility, evidence, and scoring are standardized across all 22 categories so a workforce IAM entry and a decentralized identity entry are judged on equivalent rigor.

Eligibility

Submissions are open to any organization that has deployed, operated, or substantially evolved a CIAM, workforce IAM, privileged access, decentralized identity, or identity threat detection program in the 18 months preceding the 14 March 2026 deadline. Vendor entries are accepted only where the deployment is the vendor's own production environment; customer success stories must be submitted by the customer.

Evidence Portfolio

Every entry requires a written case study (1,500–3,000 words), architecture documentation, a metric pack with at least three quantified outcomes, and a reference letter from a non-affiliated stakeholder. Finalists are contacted for a 60-minute interview with a member of the judging panel.

Scoring — The CIS Excellence Framework

The framework is a 142-criterion maturity model organized into six domains: strategy, architecture, deployment execution, measurable outcomes, risk reduction, and program maturity. Each criterion is weighted; the weighting is published in the submission kit. No single criterion exceeds 4% of the total score, preventing any one dimension from dominating the verdict.

142 Scoring criteria
6 Maturity domains
41 Judges · 100% CISSP / CIAM
25% Panel refreshed annually

The framework is referenced by Gartner analysts and is the basis for the verifiable digital badge awarded to winners — cryptographically signed proof-of-award that survives the badge-fraud common in vendor-run programs.

Submissions Open · Closes 14 March 2026

Found your category? Start the entry.

The 2026 submission kit includes the framework weights, the evidence checklist, and three worked examples from prior finalists. Submitting takes most teams between six and twelve hours of focused work.

Submit Your Entry for 2026 Download the Submission Kit (PDF)