Infrastructure Technology and CyberSecurity are among the Tech sectors that will benefit from increased consumer spending in the coming months.
We recently wrote about elevated Personal Income levels due to multiple rounds of fiscal handouts. Consumers will spend this money now that the warm weather is here. Technology companies outside of “Consumer Tech” will benefit from consumer spending in the coming months. Infrastructure companies such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Mastercard, PayPal, Square, Stripe and Visa to name a few. These companies underpin consumer-facing software applications and/or financial transactions. A derivative sector that will benefit from increased consumer spending is CyberSecurity. We predict a forthcoming increase in cyberbreaches associated with online booking of travel and lodging. We reviewed a number of hotel and travel-related Websites several months ago and front-end security is awful. Many hotel websites for example do not offer two-factor authentication (“2FA”) – the equivalent of begging to be hacked. This demonstrates that CyberSecurity is still not a C-Level issue for many companies – including Fortune 1000 companies. Perhaps many CEOs incorrectly assume that because they have cyber-insurance they have no worries. Newsflash – customers care. Speaking personally and for CEORater we won’t engage in an online financial relationship with a service provider unless that provider offers 2FA security. I am a fan of CyberSecurity companies that offer scalable (often AI-driven) endpoint protection. I am not a fan of Single Sign-On (“SSO”) technology given the risk associated with a single point of failure. Last, Google Travel (GOOG) ought to benefit from lax security protocols and poor online user experiences associated with many travel-related websites.