Microsoft will struggle with security

Their security offerings focus only on their ecosystem

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer or any other entities with which I am affiliated.

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As I’ve attended events recently, people in my network regularly bring up Microsoft’s security business and debate how it imposes an existential threat to current security companies. The topic has gained more traction as cybersecurity budgets either stay the same or shrink. Microsoft plays well into this trend by providing a suite/platform of products, resulting in vendor consolation and lower operational costs. Another benefit is that not only is Microsoft a trusted name but also having more offerings in their platform allows security teams to work on security problems rather than wasting their time evaluating and possibly switching vendors.

However, in this post, I argue that although Microsoft might gain market share, it’ll struggle to compete against next-gen security companies, such as Crowdstrike and Palo Alto Networks. In other words, Microsoft will primarily take market share from legacy vendors rather than the likes of Crowdstrike and Palo Alto Networks.

What is Microsoft?

Microsoft doesn’t require any sort of introduction. It’s a huge software conglomerate that provides many types of software and services, such as cloud services (Azure), professional social networking (LinkedIn), and SaaS (Office 365). What’s important here is that it has a substantial cloud business, but in my mind, it’s primarily seen as an IT company rather than a modern software company with the strange anomaly of GitHub, which was acquired in 2018 for 7.5B in stock (a value that has only increased since the acquisition).

Microsoft as an IT company

Microsoft was and still is primarily known for its productivity software, namely the Office suite. Similarly, the Windows operating system can be considered a piece of productivity software as it provides an interface to do work on your computer without having to create your own scripts and command line tools. As a result, Microsoft has always been perceived as a productivity software company. Companies buy Microsoft to increase the productivity of their workers. For example, their word processing and spreadsheet solutions are commonplace.