Most of us have heard of Norton security products, but they are just the consumer tip of the Symantec iceberg. Underneath is one of the oldest, largest, and most comprehensive enterprise cyber security companies – but that description does not do justice to its scope.

And even though it was founded back in 1982 the back story is just interesting history best regaled by the Wiki article here.

Because every company needs to reinvent itself regularly and, two things have happened over the past 12 months. First, it de-merged the Veritas business (essentially data recovery and backup) to the Carlyle Group for US$8 billion and second, it acquired the Blue Coat business (essentially network security, incident detection, and analytics) for US$4.65 billion.

What Blue Coat and Symantec have in common is a voracious appetite for acquiring technologies to expand their technology and offerings and a strong will to succeed. Greg Clark, the former CEO of Blue Coat is now the CEO of Symantec and Michael Fey, former COO of Blue Coat is the new COO of Symantec.

Symantec bills itself as the global leader in next-generation cyber security and says its breadth of offerings and capabilities – endpoint, email, servers, and cloud – makes it possible to solve all your most critical security needs. That is a bold statement – how does it stack up?

Its category range covers Threat Protection, Information Protection, Cyber Security Services, and Website Security. Within each of these is a subset of products that work seamlessly.

Threat protection covers detection and blocking of threats for endpoints (desktops, mobile and now IoT devices), servers (bare metal and virtual), email, gateways, and cloud. It is backed by what is the largest global telemetry operation providing intelligence on what is happening.

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