Microsoft Corp.’s new security chief, Charlie Bell gives a message for companies and institutions buffeted by a seemingly never-ending string of cyberattacks: Take shelter in the cloud.

Reports suggest that, Microsoft has built a $15 billion business and one of the world’s biggest private cyber armies to counter cyberattacks, but the storm of threats is expanding. U.S. banks flagged nearly $ 600 million in ransomware payments during the first six months of 2021, and cybersecurity experts put the cost of that much higher. Corporate and public networks are also under siege from scammers looking to steal their money and government-backed hackers looking to steal their secrets.

Bell says, “it’s sort of like the mother of all problems. If you don’t solve it, all the other technology stuff just doesn’t happen."

Microsoft finds itself uniquely positioned in the center of all of this activity, Mr. Bell said. Its email and office-productivity products are dominant on corporate and government networks, and it is the country’s No. 2 provider of cloud-computing services.

According to the reports, Bell, who at Amazon helped build the world’s largest cloud business, says Microsoft is taking center stage in combating cybercrime. Some of its customers have said the company has more to do.

Reports suggest that Microsoft would be offering a simpler way to use its security products on Google’s cloud, a major competitor to its own Azure cloud. Microsoft had previously created a version of its security product compatible with Amazon’s cloud, so now its popular security software will be available at the three companies that account for more than 65 percent of all cloud infrastructure services.

“Bringing Microsoft’s security solutions to the clouds of different companies is crucial to solving cybersecurity issues, because companies today are often dependent on too many small security products that defend only parts of their data,” Bell adds.

Bell says, “get kind of a Frankenstein solution. The problem is everywhere you glue things together, there are seams and those seams become places that people attack.”

Microsoft’s cybersecurity business has been consolidating its lead in the highly fragmented industry. Last month, the company said its cybersecurity business surpassed $15 billion in sales for the previous year, up 45 percent from a year earlier.