Forward, the leader in safer agentic NetOps and trustworthy autonomous networking at scale, today announced two awards from Cyber Defense Magazine (CDM), the industry’s leading electronic information security magazine. The magazine named Forward one of the Top 25 Most Innovative Cybersecurity Companies in the World for 2026 and recognized Forward Predict with the 2026 Top InfoSec Innovator Award for Publisher’s Choice in AI Security and Compliance as part of its 14th Annual InfoSec Awards. Forward Predict is a first-of-its-kind capability that enables organizations to assess the impact of network changes before execution, providing a critical foundation for safe agentic NetOps.

“The most dangerous moment on an enterprise network is when a change accomplishes what it was designed to do, but has an unintended consequence of opening a door nobody meant to open,” said Nikhil Handigol, Chief AI Officer and co-founder of Forward. “Nothing breaks, so nobody notices until there is an incident. And in the post-Mythos era of AI-driven vulnerability discovery, attackers can find and exploit that gap in minutes. Forward Predict closes it. It gives NetOps and SecOps teams the same evidence of what a change will do, and whether it alters security posture in any way they didn’t approve, before the change goes live. As AI agents begin to act on the network, security posture can’t be something you learn about after the fact. It has to be something you prove before you commit.”

Proof Before Network Changes Reach Production

Built on Forward Enterprise’s mathematically accurate digital twin, Forward Predict gives SecOps and NetOps a shared basis for evaluating proposed changes. It compares reachability and isolation before and after change, enabling organizations to confirm that intended connections work and security boundaries hold. This verification provides a critical foundation for agentic NetOps, allowing organizations to assess AI-driven changes before execution.

“We scoured the globe looking for cybersecurity innovators that could make a huge difference and potentially help turn the tide against the exponential growth in cyber-crime. Forward is worthy of being named a winner in these coveted awards and consideration for deployment in your environment,” said Yan Ross, Editor of Cyber Defense Magazine.

View the full list of Cyber Defense Awards winners.

To learn more about Forward Predict, visit www.forwardnetworks.com/predict or request a demo.

About Forward

Forward makes safe autonomous networking possible. The company’s mathematically accurate network digital twin delivers deterministic proof of how any change will affect the production network before it is made, giving organizations the behavioral insight they need to move fast, operate securely, and scale with confidence across multi-vendor environments and every major cloud, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM.

Global leaders, including Goldman Sachs, PayPal, S&P Global, IBM, and Dell, alongside other Fortune 500 enterprises, fast-growing companies, and government agencies, rely on Forward to ensure network behavior matches intent. According to a recent IDC report, the average Forward customer experiences $14.2M in annual benefits through improved efficiency and security.

Backed by A. Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, MSD Partners, Omega Venture Partners, Section 32, and Threshold Ventures, Forward is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. For more information, visit www.forwardnetworks.com.

About Cyber Defense Awards

This is Cyber Defense Magazine’s fourteenth year of honoring InfoSec innovators from around the Globe. Our submission requirements are for any startup, early stage, later stage, or public companies in the INFORMATION SECURITY (INFOSEC) space who believe they have a unique and compelling value proposition for their product or service. Learn more at www.cyberdefenseawards.com.

About Cyber Defense Magazine

Cyber Defense Magazine is the premier source of cyber security news and information for InfoSec professionals in business and government. We are managed and published by and for ethical, honest, passionate information security professionals. Our mission is to share cutting-edge knowledge, real-world stories and awards on the best ideas, products, and services in the information technology industry. We deliver electronic magazines every month online for free, and special editions exclusively for the RSAC Conferences, Black Hat Conferences and Cyber Defense Conferences. CDM is a proud member of the Cyber Defense Media Group. Learn more about us at https://www.cyberdefensemagazine.com and visit https://www.cyberdefensetv.com and https://www.cyberdefenseradio.com to see and hear some of the most informative interviews of many of these award winning company executives. Search for a Cybersecurity job at https://www.cyberdefenseprofessionals.com or post an infosec job for free, anytime. Join a webinar at https://www.cyberdefensewebinars.com and realize that infosec knowledge is power.

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