The third CybersecAsia Readers' Choice Awards named winners across seventeen categories, drawn from 42 security vendors that submitted 96 nominations. The organisers say editors trimmed the field to 85 entries, and that 764 voters from end-user organisations in the region each cast votes for up to two vendors per category, with the highest count winning.

The release frames the awards around two years in which boards and executives across Asia-Pacific grew more aware of cybersecurity, prompted by high-profile breaches and heavier compliance expectations, even as the volume of attacks rose. Among the named winners are Hillstone Networks, for critical infrastructure protection, and BlackBerry, for endpoint and extended detection and response. A hall of fame recognises vendors that have won in each of the scheme's three years, and a virtual panel on 23 November 2022 gathered winners to look back at the year's incidents.

What a readers' vote measures

An award of this kind measures familiarity and reach as much as capability. Vendors submit themselves; readers vote; the vendor with the most votes wins. That is a reasonable way to gauge which names are in front of buyers, and it is not a test of whether any product detects more or blocks better — the things a security team cannot easily verify before purchase, and the reason brand and analyst presence carry so much weight in this market.

The release is careful enough to be read this way: it says voters came from end-user organisations, not that winners were tested. The useful information is the shape of the field — 42 vendors, 17 categories, a rising-star slot for newcomers — which describes a crowded Asia-Pacific market in which attention is the scarce resource. Whether a reader's-choice laurel predicts anything about a product is exactly the question an award cannot answer.