• From Canadian Thanksgiving to Erntedankfest, gratitude runs global—and in cybersecurity, surviving the week unscathed is always cause for celebration.
• I’m thankful for our marketing legends, groundbreaking AI innovations, and epic trade show booths where SOC success takes center stage and every visitor feels like a rockstar.
• With visionary partners and a fearless, authentic team, we’re redefining cybersecurity. So raise a fork (or firewall) to the legends who make it happen.

Thanksgiving is just a week away! Although if, like me, you live in Canada, it’s already come and gone. We celebrate Thanksgiving in October, along with other early birds like Germany, whose Thanksgiving celebration is known as Erntedankfest. That’s almost as much of a mouthful as “Canadian Thanksgiving,” a phrase so bewildering to my American colleagues that they give me the side-eye and ask if I’m getting enough oxygen here up north.

But giving thanks is important, especially in this business. Cybersecurity professionals don’t have it easy. The average enterprise is attacked nearly 2,000 times a week. For SOC analysts, just making it to Friday without a full-on disaster is cause to pass the mashed potatoes and raise a glass.

This American Thanksgiving (that’s right, I said it), I’m grateful for the incomparable teams playing defense while the rest of us sink into the couch for a tryptophan-induced nap, college football, or a bit of both. Read on to find out who they are. There’s not a turkey in the bunch. 

Legend makers

My marketing team draws crowds to our booth at every conference and trade show with their hard-rocking Legends Never Die brand campaign. Our booth goes hard with an epic look and feel that showcases the creative genius and long-respected strengths of Symantec and Carbon Black, while putting tradeshow attendees center stage with a chance to star in their own music idol dreams. (Trust me: They’ll never confuse us for just a warm-up act.)

Our brand hits just the right note of high-flying, fun-loving attitude while still keeping our feet firmly grounded in the SOC. Just fire up a playlist of SECURITY.COM The Podcast, launched earlier this year and hosted by Dan Mellinger, and you’ll find a lineup of security icons sharing their battle-tested insight and expertise. No fluff, just security candor at its finest.

You won’t see anything else like us in the cybersecurity space because there is nothing like us in the cybersecurity space. When it comes to Symantec and Carbon Black, some legends are true. As a marketer, I’m thankful to represent icons.

Ground breakers

I’m fortunate to work for a company so committed to innovation that we spent $11,000 a minute on R&D in Fiscal 2024. A bag that big buys you innovation breakthroughs so bold they redefine the operations of the modern SOC. 

Consider some of our recently debuted AI-powered solutions. Our engineering team developed them knowing that once the bad guys are inside your environment you need to detect and respond quickly and confidently—because attacks can unfold in a matter of minutes. In the time it takes to enjoy that second piece of pie, an attacker could be well on their way to spoiling your holiday faster than that one uncle who loves to combine politics with “wine appreciation.”

Our innovations tell the bad guys to get stuffed. Take Incident Prediction, which is reshaping threat detection as the industry’s first AI-powered feature to predict an attacker’s next four to five moves with up to 100% confidence. Or Adaptive Protection, which leverages AI to automatically block anomalous use of legitimate software—a potential signal of an attempted living off the land (LOTL) attack. Then there’s Threat Tracer, which relies on machine learning (ML)-curated alerts to visually and dynamically map the blast radius of an attack. 

That’s just the beginning. An even longer list of exclusive capabilities leverage Google’s Gemini Flash 2.5 series for agentic AI to automate threat analysis, reduce alert fatigue by providing clear narratives and remediation steps, enhance script classification, refine false positive detection, and enable natural language queries for faster, more intuitive threat response. And don’t get me started on our award-winning endpoint and EDR solutions, acclaimed DLP protections, ROI-proven Security Service Edge (SSE) solutions, and analyst-recognized email security defenses. Our defense suite is serving main dish energy, spiced to perfection.

Rainmakers

We broke the usual go-to-market mold when we created the Catalyst Partner program, a bold reimagining of the channel software sales model. The program deploys a curated roster of partners who represent the Symantec and Carbon Black business in their respective territories worldwide. These partners have activated their own channels to sell, implement, and support our solutions. The result is a global network of local experts offering guidance and support on all Symantec and Carbon Black solutions. 

Like every dish in a Hallmark Channel Thanksgiving feast (all smiles and happy endings), our Catalyst Partners know how to satisfy. They pair the expertise their markets need with the marketing muscle to promote and reinforce our legendary brands in their regions. If our recent Partner Advisory Board event was any indication, these partners are led by visionaries who know what security teams need right now and how to get it to them and let them cook.

Risk takers

I work with courageous people. From launching our partner-driven go-to-market model to intentionally pushing away that tired, everything-you’ve-seen-before branding, the people I’m lucky enough to break bread with are talented, hard-working, collaborative, utterly creative, and 100% real. That last part is so important to me. I expect authenticity from my team, because I know our customers and prospects demand and deserve authenticity from us. No tofurkey here (unless you’re vegan, and in that case knock yourself out).

The truth is, whether it’s American Thanksgiving, Canadian Thanksgiving, Erntedankfest, or a random Thursday, I have so many reasons to be thankful, to be joyful, and to urge you to find those same places of gratitude in your life. At work, at home, and everywhere.

So if you escape disaster for another week, pour one out for all the SOC analysts getting alerts over their Thanksgiving meal. Cherish everything that’s good. And remember the one thing those of us in this business should never forget: We’re all in this together.

And that’s something we all can be thankful for.