The cybersecurity industry is changing as AI accelerates software development, and new security risks reshape how organizations protect their applications. Businesses need to understand these risks and trust the solutions they use. Clear communication, strong customer relationships, and measurable results are essential to building that trust.
Karen Buffo, Chief Marketing Officer at Veracode, brings more than 18 years of global security expertise across marketing, strategy, communications, business enablement, sales enablement, product management, and industry relations. Her experience at leading technology and cybersecurity companies has shaped how she builds brands, grows businesses, and leads teams. She focuses on turning plans into action, understanding customer needs, and building trust through real results.
Let’s explore how she connects marketing, strategy, and trust to support growth in cybersecurity.
A Career Shaped by Diverse Experiences
Karen’s career did not follow a straight line, and she believes that this is what made it so formative. She started her career at Oracle, where she was handpicked by the CEO to develop and manage communications programs for the executive office. This experience gave her an early understanding of corporate strategy, global communication, and how to translate complex ideas into language that resonates across cultures, geographies, and stakeholder groups.
It also shaped her view of leadership communication. She learned that it is not about controlling the message, but about ensuring people understand where the organization is going and why it matters.
When she moved to Symantec, her responsibilities expanded beyond communications. Over thirteen years, she worked across strategic planning, business enablement, sales engineering, customer programs, analyst relations, and product management. She was part of the senior leadership team that developed and implemented a new company strategy for cybersecurity services. She also helped establish a breach advisory practice that later grew into a full incident response capability and created CyberWar Games, an immersive education program for more than 10,000 employees worldwide.
Looking back, she values both the impact of the work and the relationships she built. Working across different functions helped her understand how each part of a business connects with the others. As she explains, “The best leaders do not just manage their own area; they connect the dots across the business and create the conditions for every function to contribute to a shared outcome.”
Building Market Position Through Trust
At Veracode, Karen leads marketing in an industry where application security and business risk are closely connected. Customers are not simply buying a product. They are trusting a company with the security of their software, the integrity of their brands, and, in many cases, their regulatory compliance.
For her, trust is the foundation of marketing. Her approach begins with understanding the company’s distinctive capabilities and how they meet the market’s most pressing needs. As Veracode extends its leadership beyond Application Risk Management to a broader Trust Platform – marketing must clearly communicate the value of its solutions through evidence, customer outcomes, and an understanding of the challenges customers face.
She works closely with Sales, Operations, Product, and Customer Success to drive pipeline,
strengthen customer and partner relationships, and provide market intelligence. Marketing must generate demand while building the credibility that encourages customers to stay with the company over the long term.
She believes that trust must be demonstrated rather than simply claimed. She wants customers to experience the product through trials and proof-of-value engagements. Instead of relying only on demonstrations, teams can use a prospective customer’s actual use case, environment, and data to show how the platform performs. As she puts it, “It can’t be smoke and mirrors.”
Analyst recognition and peer review sites also matter because they offer independent validation. For her, “Market position is a promise that must be proven at every touchpoint, from campaigns and customer events to analyst interactions and partner conversations.”
Lessons in Brand Building and Business Growth
Each organization Karen has worked with has taught her something distinct about brand building and go-to-market strategy. Oracle showed her the value of a clear, consistent narrative, while Symantec and Broadcom taught her how to manage change. At Broadcom, she was retained through the acquisition to lead marketing for the $2 billion Symantec Enterprise Division. During this period, she helped grow share of voice by 58% year over year and achieve a 37% increase in Net Promoter Score through customer events.
At Anomali, she developed a global marketing strategy that contributed to more than 50% of the pipeline and improved lead quality by 67%. She also built a channel partner program from the beginning. Later, as MixMode’s first CMO, she created the brand narrative, messaging platform, marketing function, and team. The company earned 15 Gartner report mentions in six months and achieved marketing-sourced pipeline that contributed to 60% of total annual recurring revenue.
These experiences reinforced her belief that go-to-market strategy must reflect a company’s stage, market conditions, and available resources. She also sees a strong connection between brand and growth: a strong brand supports sustainable growth, while measurable results demonstrate that the brand promise is real.
Connecting Strategy with Execution
Karen begins by listening to customers, the market, analysts, and people within the organization who are closest to the work. She looks for the intersection of three factors: what the company does better than others, what the market needs most urgently, and what can create a lasting competitive advantage.
Turning these insights into strategy requires making choices and focusing resources on the right opportunities. At Anomali, this meant developing go-to-market strategies and improving lead handoff efficiency by 50% through an in-house business development representative team. At MixMode, it meant building a brand narrative that gained recognition from Gartner, IDC, and 451 Research.
She believes alignment between marketing, product, and sales must be built into everyday work. This requires a shared understanding of the product roadmap, competitive conditions, and revenue goals, along with connected performance metrics and continuous feedback from customers and the market. Customer advisory boards, analyst interactions, and field intelligence help teams adjust their plans as needs change.
Building Teams and Encouraging Growth
Karen has built marketing organizations from the ground up and has continued to develop a global marketing organization at Veracode. Her teams cover areas including communications, field marketing, channel marketing, analyst relations, product marketing, demand generation, marketing operations, content marketing and brand services.
Her first principle is to start with the business outcome, not the organizational chart. She defines what the team needs to deliver and then builds the structure and capabilities to support those goals. She also values people who are skilled, willing to grow, collaborative, and aligned with the organization’s values.
For her, culture determines whether people can do their best work. She believes in openness and psychological safety, where people can contribute ideas, learn from mistakes, and take responsibility for outcomes. Clear goals, trust, and accountability help teams work toward a common vision.
Inclusion is equally important to her leadership approach. She believes people across different levels, regions, and backgrounds should have a genuine opportunity to contribute. Her involvement in Women in Technology chapters, STEM committees, and Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS) reflects her commitment to supporting women and strengthening participation across the industry.
Mentoring is another important part of her work. She has supported the development of future women leaders through programs such as Symantec’s Accelerating Women for Impact and the WiCyS Leadership Summit. She helps team members identify growth paths, take on responsibilities that challenge them, and access guidance when needed. She also recognizes that mentoring works both ways, as colleagues at different career stages bring new perspectives and ideas.
Measuring Marketing Impact
Karen believes marketing should be measured rigorously, while recognizing that some results take longer to develop. She tracks pipeline and revenue alongside indicators such as share of voice, analyst recognition, Net Promoter Score, customer engagement, and earned media.
Most recently, at Veracode, marketing-sourced pipeline grew 16.6% from the previous quarter, while marketing-attributed pipeline reached 158.5% of the quarterly target – exceeding it by a wider margin and growing more than 50% from the previous quarter. EMEA pipeline also grew 13.5% quarter over quarter, with LATAM contributing meaningfully to the overall results.
For her, these measures show how marketing can support immediate business goals while building long-term credibility. She sees brand and performance as complementary: a strong brand helps performance marketing work harder, while measurable results strengthen the brand.
Preparing for the AI Era
Karen sees AI as one of the biggest forces shaping cybersecurity. As development teams use AI to produce code at increasing speed, identifying vulnerabilities and understanding the risks within software become more challenging. She believes the industry must focus not only on features and capabilities, but also on outcomes, intelligence, and trust.
At Veracode, this direction includes building a trust platform that evaluates code against relevant regulations, internal policies, and other requirements before deployment. The next step is a control plane that can determine whether code is ready to ship or whether required components are missing. As she explains, “This is going to be critical, especially with new regulations and CISOs being held personally accountable for the security of the software they deploy.”
She also believes cybersecurity has become a board-level priority, connected to risk management, regulatory compliance, brand reputation, and business continuity. Marketing must therefore communicate security in business terms, helping leaders understand its value beyond technical capabilities.
Veracode’s approach to end-to-end trust across the software development lifecycle is organized around four principles: Govern, Guide, Verify, and Assure. Together, these focus on visibility and policy enforcement, secure development guidance, validation before deployment, and ongoing assurance across operational environments.
As she continues to lead marketing at Veracode, her priorities remain connecting strategy to execution, building credible brands, creating measurable business value, and developing high-performing teams. Her focus is on extending the company’s leadership from Application Risk Management to a Trust Platform that helps organizations prove their software is safe to deploy, helping shape its market position for the long term.
Ultimately, she remains committed to creating lasting value for customers, partners, shareholders, employees, and the wider cybersecurity community.
