Despite SolarWinds Cyberattack, Microsoft's Azure Business Predicted to Benefit (marketwatch.com) 13
"Microsoft Corp. was wrapped into a massive cybersecurity attack late last year," reports MarketWatch, "but the unprecedented intrusion may actually end up being a positive for the company's bottom line."
UBS analyst Karl Keirstead, who has a buy rating and a $243 price target, said while Microsoft products were leveraged by hackers in the attack on SolarWinds Corp.'s Orion IT management software, because they are commonplace, "the broader cyber-security community are not pointing fingers at Microsoft."
Keirstead noted that the attack actually drove more customers into public cloud infrastructures like Azure, Amazon.com Inc.'s and Alphabet Inc.'s Google Cloud "given a view that cloud data centers are more secure and that constantly patching/updating on-premise software like Orion presents a security risk that can be transferred to Microsoft, Amazon or Google."
"Bottom line, we believe this cyber-security attack could be a modest net positive for Microsoft," Keirstead said.
UBS analyst Karl Keirstead, who has a buy rating and a $243 price target, said while Microsoft products were leveraged by hackers in the attack on SolarWinds Corp.'s Orion IT management software, because they are commonplace, "the broader cyber-security community are not pointing fingers at Microsoft."
Keirstead noted that the attack actually drove more customers into public cloud infrastructures like Azure, Amazon.com Inc.'s and Alphabet Inc.'s Google Cloud "given a view that cloud data centers are more secure and that constantly patching/updating on-premise software like Orion presents a security risk that can be transferred to Microsoft, Amazon or Google."
"Bottom line, we believe this cyber-security attack could be a modest net positive for Microsoft," Keirstead said.
WTF? (Score:1)
Has a buy rating and a $243 price target.
WTF does that even mean?
Bugger, just dropped my sleeve into my Marmite
Re: WTF? (Score:2)
Microsoft stock is current $225/share. The analyst says they expect the share will reach $243 so they recommend buying up to $243/share if you want to make money.
WTF!? (Score:3)
...said while Microsoft products were leveraged by hackers in the attack on SolarWinds Corp.'s Orion IT management software, because [Microsoft vulnerabilities] are commonplace, "the broader cyber-security community are not pointing fingers at Microsoft."
That's just...mind blowing logic. Because Microsoft software is so horrible that they are usually used as entry points into your sensitive data by global hackers, no one is blaming Microsoft?!
Re: WTF!? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This is very important.
A company that makes software that has poor security goes through an incident where their poor security leads to a net positive business outcome. So why in the world would they bother making products with better security?
As long as there are no business downsides to shipping products with crappy security, then that is ALL that will be shipped. No company is going to spend time and money on security if there is no positive return on investment.
Bottom line: Security is over. If it is im
Re: (Score:2)
I think most of Microsoft's on premise software -- code, licensing, documentation, security, and complexity -- is possibly influenced by the drive to move clients into cloud adoption.
Most all of their incentives around any on premise product are oriented towards driving cloud services adoption, so you can basically expect on premise anything provided by Microsoft to get no better and probably wind up being worse than some cloud offering that mostly does the same thing at elevated prices.
I'm still torn over
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Well in this instance how is it the fault of Microsoft if you install third party software that was compromised?
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People are that stupid. (Score:2)
Despite claims of the stock market being full of "rational actors," the vast majority of people trading are driven by ignorance and emotion. They read "SolarWinds attack" and delve no deeper. The truth is of no consequence and the actual rational actors know this and therefore go along with it. The net result is that the market is almost entirely driven by emotion and a shallow understanding of world events.
In short, people are dumb enough to not blame Microsoft and everyone knows it.
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Forced Updates Breaks Custom and Legacy Apps (Score:2)
Going cloud? What about legacy and custom apps? While it might be nice to be bleeding edge update-wise when it comes to security, the fact that custom programs and apps start to break too fast to keep up with is definitely a thing. I guess the cloud providers want you to gut your small dev team and just spend all that and more on their apps, that don't do quite what you need it to.
Personally, we have enough of a team to keep the critical things updated... auto-patching things on a rolling schedule so when s