Despite SolarWinds Cyberattack, Microsoft’s Azure Business Predicted to Benefit

“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.