Yes, you are probably very right on this one. Nessy showed up in the thought stream to point at the word “safeness” and I/we just played it out for a while. Although the dragon or serpent is common to nearly all cultures, and is easily shaped into the letter “S” it does offer varying subliminal messaging. For example, to the Chinese it is luck , good fortune and strength; but to the Evangelical it is a symbol of evil. At first I figured it might be a fun marketing exercise to use some of that cultural symbolism, but I think your suggestion to look to more fundamental symbols of being safe, having safety/security or safeness is more appealing. At the same time, nearly every object or symbol one could choose will have some set of preconceived notion or baggage that comes along with it, so Nessy might end up being rather tame, especially in cartoon form. You also get the old symbology related to regeneration and infinity as in the case of a Nessy/Dragon Ouroboros, but that can have a lot of negative baggage too.
A universal symbol for being “safe and secure” or having “safeness” which I’m simply defining simply via the dictionary as “the quality of being safe” is tricky. There is always standard imagery like a vault, or a mother holding a child, a trusted friend, or a person’s home, but it seems like those images would miss their mark in the case of the SAFE network. Other basic imagery that comes to mind is a nest egg or a circle.
How about a single drop of water on a leaf or hitting a surface like this kind of imagery?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ComputerHotline\_-\_Water_droplet_(by).jpg
That’s all the marketing I can muster… back to work.