Companies move swiftly to take advantage of new technologies to get an edge on the competition. Often, this leads to security vulnerabilities too big to ignore. A host of data breaches have occurred at tons of companies over the past year to prove this.

The first decade of the new millennium has been an amazing journey in the world of information security. In 2000, most of us were breathing a collective sigh of relief that, for the most part, our Y2K fears did not come to fruition, and we could return to our normal day-to-day responsibilities. Who knew then that the information security landscape would change so dramatically?

We've known for a very long time now, that the "fortress" approach to information security is ineffective. This year, thanks to a slowly recovering economy, our business requirements are forcing us to find new and innovative approaches to secure and protect our most critical information. Whether driven by M&A, outsourcing or "cloud" computing, organizations are being forced to rethink their strategic approaches to information protection.

The winners of the most popular security blog, best corporate security blog and "five to follow" on Twitter.

Winner: McAfee for McAfee Web Gateway

Winner: Guidance Software for EnCase Forensic

Winner: TippingPoint Technologies for TippingPoint Intrusion Prevention System

Winner: PGP Corp. for PGP Whole Disk Encryption

Winner: Juniper Networks for Juniper Networks Unified Access Control

Winner: Check Point Software Technologies for Check Point Security Gateway R70

Winner: VeriSign for VeriSign Personal Identity Portal

Winner: Symantec for Symantec Protection Suite Enterprise Edition

Winner: Cisco Systems for Cisco Intrusion Prevention System

Winner: Barracuda Networks for Barracuda SSL VPN

Winner: Google for Google Message Security, powered by Postini

Winner: Cisco Systems for Cisco IronPort Email Security

Winner: IronKey for IronKey Enterprise with Remote Management Service

Winner: RSA, the security division of EMC, for RSA SecurID

Winner: SonicWALL for SonicWALL Universal Management Appliance (UMA) EM5000

Winner: ArcSight for ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM)

Winner: VeriSign for VeriSign Code Signing

Winner: Qualys for QualysGuard

Winner: F5 Networks for BIG-IP Application Security Manager

Winner: Cisco Systems for Cisco IronPort S-Series Secure Web Gateway

Winner: IBM

Winner: HyTrust

Winner: McAfee for McAfee Total Protection for Endpoint

Winner: e-DMZ Security for TPAM Suite

Winner: Astaro Internet Security for Astaro Security Gateway

Winner: SANS Institute for SANS Training

Winner: (ISC)2 for CISSP

Winner: eBay

Winner: Mark Weatherford, CISO, office of information security, state of California

Winner: National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance