Hi there, me, it’s you. 

I’d say “long time no see,” but since we’re together pretty much 24/7, I’ll just get right to it. Like mom always told us, thank-you notes follow a “better late than never” policy. Here is yours comin’ in hot from Jan. 1, 2027. 

It’s hard to believe it’s only been 365 days since last January, when you committed to making 2026—what did you call it? “The Security Era”? No, that’s not it. Oh, wait, I remember: “My Year of Legendary Defenses.” I know I laughed a bit at how seriously you were taking yourself. But I’ve got to admit you were on to something. Your decision to focus your every SOC decision solely on defending your organization’s most valued principles and assets turned out to be a game changer. I can’t wait to tell you about how everything you did in 2026 paid off. 

The tools you were right to bet on

First of all: Incident Summaries. Whoa. I know you had some doubts in the beginning—like, would AI really be able to provide reliable analysis and time-saving summaries? But you followed the future and made the leap, and I am very glad you did. Alert fatigue is way down and productivity is even higher than you projected because your SOC team is now freed up to focus on strategy. Thank you. 

Oh, and remember when you thought Threat Tracer could accelerate junior analyst involvement in investigations? You. Were. Right. Not only did it streamline investigations as advertised, but Threat Tracer also turned out to be a great training tool. By visualizing attack chains and relationships between entities, Threat Tracer showed analysts with less expertise how an attack took shape and helped them grasp its actual blast radius. I gotta hand it to you: Maximizing your junior analyst skills multiplied your force, giving more SOC team members the ability to visualize the blast radius of attacks all year long. This was prescient.

Where you absolutely nailed it

Speaking of your inestimable predictive powers (doffs imaginary cap here), implementing Incident Prediction was another brilliant move. As you predicted (ba-dump-bump!) its ability to forecast an attacker’s next four or five moves put our SOC more than a few steps ahead of the bad guys and reduced stress all year long. Well done, you.

Your Zero Trust initiative also earned your team’s trust in ways I am not sure even you could have imagined. By training Adaptive Protection on your organization's typical use of standard legitimate tools like Windows utilities, you built smarter defenses. You’ll be happy to hear that you are now leveraging Adaptive Protection to set a policy for spotting atypical behaviors and blocking anomalous (and potentially dodgy) use of legit software. Your “just say no” approach to managing access to files and software didn’t slow us down, either. Threats like living off the land (LOTL) attacks got stopped at the door, while only trustworthy applications and files cut the rope line for efficient VIP access. Cue the 90’s hip-hop because these moves were too legit to quit. In 2026, they were sensational. In 2027, they’ll prove foundational.  

How you kept us out of trouble

Let’s talk AI. Your choice to add strong DLP protections and policies for LLM and AI agent use reduced the risk that our priceless data would get scooped up and mishandled. Knowing our sensitive corporate and customer data was tucked away securely, and not out partying till the wee hours in some unsecured public LLM, helped us all sleep at night. My fading undereye circles thank you. 

All year long, you weaponized AI for good instead of evil. By assigning AI-powered agents to assess threats and autonomously engage threat analysis tools to reveal insights and answer questions, you saved precious time and improved your metrics for mean-time-to-remediation (MTTR), among others. Much as we both love cardio, we also did way less running around chasing down false positives thanks to AI-powered improvements to Carbon Black EDR. We now have time for more productive workouts. 

Now, everything feels easier

Honestly, the whole team is in better shape since you invested in faster SSE that delivers a bandwidth of up to 100X more than competing solutions. Budgets gonna budget, and talent mileage varies, but you recognized that time is the one commodity that everyone has in equal measure, regardless of other resources. So, thank you for the gift of time. I’ve been doing my best to spend it wisely.

Me, I am so grateful to you. 

Your educated insights and predictive powers meant that 2026 really did end up being a year of legendary defense. If you have any stock tips you want to share, I’ll take them. (Wait. Would that be insider trading?) For now, let’s keep innovating, adapting and making bold moves backed by legendary programs and groundbreaking tools. This past year was fantastic, but we’re just getting started, you and me. Great things await us both, and 2027 might be our best year yet.