3 Stocks to Watch After the Microsoft 365 Outage

A single outage at Microsoft 365 just turned a routine Friday into a real-world stress test for business continuity. When Outlook, Teams and Copilot go dark across 74 countries, investors see more than inconvenience. They see budgets, contracts and risk priorities reshuffling in real time. This article walks through three stocks tied to incident response and crisis communications that could sit directly in the path of that shifting spend.

The three stocks in this piece are a narrow sample of what outage risk can mean for public markets, and the full screen surfaced 18 more companies with equally detailed business continuity and incident response narratives that are not covered here. If you want to move from headlines to a focused watchlist, head straight into the Incident Response, Business Continuity & Crisis-Communications Services screener to identify, analyze and prioritize your highest conviction ideas.

S&J (TSE:5599)

S&J is a Japan based cybersecurity specialist that monitors client systems, tests defenses and runs incident response and continuity training, putting it squarely in the business continuity and outage readiness theme. The group is valued at about ¥8.3b, giving investors exposure to a focused security services provider.

S&J directly helps organisations prepare for and recover from outages through SOC monitoring, incident response and continuity consulting, which lines up cleanly with this incident response screener. Forecast growth, high quality earnings and reasonable P/E all draw attention, especially if one unresolved governance pressure starts to influence how clients judge resilience partners.

If that governance overhang is your sticking point, start with the 2 key rewards and 1 important major warning sign to evaluate whether the potential upside truly outweighs the friction.

Trend Micro (TSE:4704)

Trend Micro is a global cybersecurity provider with tools that help companies detect threats, manage incidents and keep systems running through outages, giving it a clear link to this incident response and continuity screen. The stock is a large cap, with a market value of about ¥864.4b.

The bullish analyst Narrative on Simply Wall St argues that Trend Micro’s outage ready security stack really matters when boards are asking how to keep operations online even when a major cloud provider struggles.

"TrendAI passing US$1b in cumulative AWS Marketplace sales signals under appreciated leverage from hyperscale channels that could widen the distribution of Vision One and related services and in time support higher subscription revenue and operating margins than a direct only model."

What happens to that margin story if one key cost line refuses to settle down just as this wider distribution kicks in?

If that cost line is your worry point, read the full narrative for Trend Micro to see how Trend Micro’s margin story could still accelerate from here.

AvePoint (AVPT)

AvePoint helps businesses keep critical Microsoft 365 and other SaaS data available when major cloud tools fail, which puts it right in the middle of incident response and business continuity planning. The software and programming operation generated about US$488 million of revenue, and the stock is valued at roughly US$3.5b.

AvePoint’s cloud data protection pitch resonates most when investors think about Microsoft 365 as a single point of failure. The bearish analyst Narrative on Simply Wall St leans into that by focusing on how outage planning, AI trust and resilience spending might translate into long term recurring dollars.

"Although AvePoint is seeing strong interest in AI trust offerings such as AgentPulse, with customers often managing over 5,000 agents and deal sizes 2x to 3x higher when these bundles are included, enterprises are still delaying AI deployments due to security incidents and trust concerns, which could limit how much of this AI agent proliferation actually converts into recurring revenue growth and ARR over the next few years."

The real swing factor is how one pressure on future growth and profitability resolves just as outage readiness and AI governance budgets expand.

As that growth overhang resolves, read the full narrative for AvePoint to see how AvePoint’s outage and AI trust story could be accelerating beneath the surface.

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