2026 SC Award winner Ankur Shah of Straiker — Security Executive of the Year

Ankur Shah, CEO of Straiker, is the winner of the 2026 SC Award for Security Executive of the Year for his leadership in advancing cloud and AI security while building high-performing teams across the cybersecurity industry.

Before founding Straiker, Shah served as SVP and general manager of the Prisma Cloud business at Palo Alto Networks, overseeing a global organization of more than 1,000 employees across engineering, product and customer success. During his tenure, Prisma Cloud evolved from a single module into a leading cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP), achieving 50-fold revenue growth in five years.

Shah’s leadership approach focuses on investing in people and elevating emerging talent. He has consistently supported team members in pursuing industry leadership roles, contributing to initiatives such as the OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 and the global Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS) community.

Beyond business growth, Shah has become a recognized voice on cloud and AI security. He hosts the "Zero to Exit" podcast featuring cybersecurity founders and executives, speaks regularly at major conferences, including RSAC, Black Hat and AWS re:Invent, and has authored articles on cloud-native security risks and software supply chain threats. At Straiker, he continues this work by helping guide the company’s Security Threat and Adversarial Research (STAR) team as it publishes research on emerging AI-native attacks.

“By actively elevating his team members into industry leaders, he solidifies his status as a premier, forward-looking security executive,” said SC Awards judge Ammar Ekbote, security and engineering leader at Pinterest.