Welcome to the New King of Cybersecurity … Microsoft

If you are into cybersecurity, get ready for Microsoft to become an increasingly dominant force in the market. Their partnership with OpenAI will bring so many advances, especially within their XDR (extended detection and response) infrastructure. Companies such as Cisco (with Splunk), Checkpoint, Trend Micro, Cloudstrike, Fortinet and Palo Alto are all rushing to provide AI-driven platforms but will struggle against the might of the Azure cloud (with Microsoft’s “killer app”, Active Directory integration).

For us, we built a Splunk environment for our students to learn about cybersecurity data analysis [here]:

But we now building an XDR infrastructure, as the jobs market will increasingly demand architectures and analysts who can use this infrastructure:

Microsoft were late to the cybersecurity market, but have eventually caught up with the other leaders. While Splunk changed everything in cybersecurity, and crushed the comborsome HPE Arcsight and IBM QRadar, they now know that the future of cybersecurity will involved AI integration. The genius move for them, is that they have invested over $10 billion in OpenAI, and have a direct partnership. This means that OpenAI does not go onto the public market, and where Microsoft can steer its focus onto the Azure cloud.

So, watch this space, and where we will have a whole new environment for learning how to be a security analyst in an increasingly Microsoft-focused world. Basically, it’s not a good thing to be so dependent on one company, but it’s difficult to spot their power in the market.

Let’s hope a new Splunk will appear sometime soon, but my advice to any up-and-coming cybersecurity companies, is to focus their integration of one of the major platforms, and XDR is possibly at-the-fore.