How Symantec Aced the AV-Test – Again

As a security professional, Job No. 1 is to make sure that our products protect customers. We either pass or fail - there are no halfway grades in the real world.

So when the AV-Test Institute announced that Symantec and Norton security solutions had won a haul of six AV-TEST awards in a rigorous industry-wide competition, I was obviously thrilled for our team.

The awards recognize their accomplishment turning out technologies and tools that help countless customers remain safe from threats posed by a dangerous assortment of cyber criminals and actors working on behalf of nation states.

But as proud as I was of their achievement - we won Best Protection awards for Norton Security and Symantec Endpoint Protection for the fourth consecutive year – it’s important to note that we also won for best performance. That’s a huge recognition of Symantec’s approach to the task of product design.

Within the security industry, the conventional wisdom among the experts was that there are always necessary tradeoffs between security and performance. You can’t have one as well as the other - so you must compromise.

At Symantec, we do not compromise performance in order to deliver maximum protection. Customers can’t sacrifice performance for security, so we have rearchitected our protection to be light and fast. We make sure users can do their work without paying performance penalties for security.

That effort has paid off. What was so great about this award is the recognition that not only are we providing unique, kick-butt security technology but that Symantec has clearly eliminated any lingering tradeoffs between security and performance.

Replenishing the Arsenal

All vendors claim good protection ability. In order to cut through the competing claims and find the truth, businesses need honest and independent arbiters who fairly test different technologies on their merits.

The AV-TEST Institute has a reputation for rigor and submits each product it compares to real world attacks. When we see attackers deploy new techniques, we see AV-TEST testing our protection against these new techniques. AV-TEST focuses on the attacks customers encounter.

What’s more, all of the vendors that participate in the competition know that their products will get reviewed without bias.

Over the years, our investment in inventing advanced security solutions has ensured that our products stay ahead in a threat landscape that’s constantly changing. As any customer can attest, it’s dangerous to rely on an aging technology as your protection layer. Things now move too fast to remain pat.

Each year, we’re developing new, advanced technologies because we recognize that there’s a world of difference between 99% protection and 100% protection. It may not sound like much but that 1% is entirely what matters. All it takes is for one threat to get in and the impact can be huge.

The upshot is a continuously replenished arsenal of new technologies - including big data platforms that track trillions of pieces of information predicting whether that activity we see is good or bad, advanced technologies that block exploit attempts (even entirely new, zero-day exploits), and our continually re-trained advanced machine learning that blocks threats proactively.

Security is often “under the hood” – there is nothing visible to see. What I like best about these awards is how they bring public recognition to the ingenuity and effort of the men and women on my team. The AV-Test is a well-deserved public recognition of their hard work.