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As you might imagine, the Trust Services team at Symantec found ourselves scratching our heads last week when one of our competitors in the SSL market announced that it was now the “number one” certification authority in the world. How could this claim be real, we questioned? After all, for over 20 years, market analysts and customers alike have recognized Symantec as the leading and most trusted provider of SSL certificate products, solutions, and services around the world.
With our curiosity piqued, we did a quick check of the most recent market reports and metrics from both Frost & Sullivan and Netcraft, the two most respected SSL market analysts in the industry. While Frost & Sullivan analyzes the SSL market from a business perspective based on the revenue share of the various competitors, Netcraft actually crawls the Internet to analyze webservers and SSL certificate information to quantify market size and share.
Their studies continue to show Symantec at the top of the market (see chart below).
Numbers aside, at Symantec, we believe “leadership” is earned rather than claimed. Symantec’s success has largely been the result of our award-winning track record of Trust, Reliability, and Speed for our customers. Over the years, we’ve demonstrated best-in-class OCSP response times allowing for faster and more secure web transactions for online businesses and consumers around the world. Moreover, the Norton Secured Seal has continuously been displayed over half a billion times per day on websites in over 170 countries, serving as the most recognized trust mark on the Internet. Over the past 2 decades, during the
tremendous growth of Internet activity and increased security threats, Symantec’s global infrastructure has NOT ONCE been compromised, never suffering a breach. On the other hand, less than a week after this competitor claimed to be “number one” in the SSL market, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported on PrivDog, an SSL tampering tool associated with the competitor (see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/24/comodo_ssl_privdog).
So we’ll let the market decide, while we continue to do our best for our customers, earning every bit of trust that we can each day.