The rise of the new threat of cyber-attack on the world is one that perhaps can no more be ignored by government or private institutions, especially in an era when about everything is ran by information. In what might be received in several quarters as staggering, Microsoft Corporation has reasserted its place as one such companies with an aggressive response to the threat with a plan to maintain its over $1 billion annual investment on cyber security research and development over the next few years.
The said amount is not inclusive of possible acquisitions that may be made by Microsoft in the sector. Â
Speaking to a journalist at the tech giant's BlueHat cyber security conference in Tel Aviv, Microsoft vice president of security, Bharat Shah said, "as more and more people use cloud, that spending has to go up".
According to Microsoft’s statistics, against 20,000 attempted cyber-attacks barely two years ago, attempts by hackers now runs between 600,000-700,000, a figure that is capable of keeping any serious institution on its guards.
The development also reflects the software giant’s gradual shift to cloud where it strives with Amazon..com in a bid to control this barely unchartered market. Microsoft had earlier in October last year disclosed that quarterly sales from its flagship cloud product Azure had risen by 116 percent.
Finally, a further assertion of the software tech giant’s deep commitment to this “new frontier†is the fact that it had bought three Israeli security firms over a two-year period: enterprise security startup Aorato, cloud security company Adallom as well as Secure Islands, all of which have had their file protection technology synchronized with Microsoft’s cloud service, Azure Information Protection.