Microsoft Exec: “It’s bad for the industry what happened to Sony”

It’s been a troublesome couple of months for Sony; finding itself the target of a dedicated hacking campaign, the company’s PlayStation Network was breached and millions of customer records stolen.

With the security of cloud-based services in doubt and worries that Microsoft’s Xbox Live service could be the next target for attackers, despite remaining unaffected by events, Dennis Durkin, COO and CFO of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB) has spoken out in support of his company’s gaming rivals, stating that hacks on Sony were “bad for the industry”:

Durkin told IndustryGamers:

“It’s bad for the industry that this has happened to Sony. It’s very, very bad. It’s very damaging. So we don’t wish that upon anybody and you’ve seen we’ve been actually pretty quiet on the subject because we don’t want to appear to even be looking to be taking advantage of somebody else’s situation like that. That’s just not in our DNA.

Microsoft has been taking steps to move more of its services into the cloud, looking to increase the quality of service, reliability and security of data to ensure that its customers feel confident about how their details are stored. It’s the same across Microsoft’s many teams but Xbox Live isn’t just a service, it’s a key factor in deciding whether consumer buy its consoles:

Xbox Live is obviously very important to our consumers. It’s part of the value proposition of why consumers buy our gaming consoles… So they want that to be on just like you want your phone to be on.

So this has really been a multi-year effort for us as a company and it’ll continue to be one because this future, which we think is very much about services and very much cloud based – whether it be entertainment consumption or productivity – in order to do that, you have to have a secure environment. So we’re going to continue to do that and we don’t want to see any of our competitors hurt along the way. We think that’s bad for consumers.”

Durkin knows that it’s not possible to protect everything, but that doesn’t mean that Microsoft won’t do all it can to secure its services, hoping to avoid what happened to Sony.

Microsoft may have benefited from the downtime of its rival but it has been reserved in its response knowing full well that it could be targeted next but for now the its impeccable record remains intact.