In our prior Tech Titans research, we mentioned that Microsoft was poised to become a security behemoth. Today, Microsoft announced that its cybersecurity business has grown to over $10 billion in revenue. Ten billion dollars in revenue with 400,000 customers cements the vendor as a cybersecurity behemoth, without a doubt.

As more and more businesses move to cloud, the idea of rationalizing the number of vendors they work with and simplifying security continues to appeal to CISOs, CIOs, and CFOs alike. Fears of “lock in” are disregarded in favor of “good enough” and “integrated.”

With offerings spanning everything from the operating system to the cloud — and everything in between, it seems — Microsoft has achieved its goal of being a mega-security vendor. For Microsoft competitors — which is almost every vendor — this also makes the company an existential threat, especially if they compete in the security analytics, endpoint, identity, and email security markets. Microsoft has appeared in over 10 Forrester Waves™ focused on security and risk since 2019. Microsoft Sentinel is an example of how quickly the vendor is moving. Sentinel only launched in September 2019. Sentinel is positioned as a Leader in our latest version of “The Forrester Wave™: Security Analytics Platforms, Q4 2020” and Microsoft reports 9,000 users on the platform.

The next phase of Microsoft’s evolution as a cybersecurity vendor will be how it handles the defense of the territory captured from other vendors.