While artificial intelligence (AI) has been the hottest area of technology over the past year, that doesn't mean that cybersecurity spending is going away. In fact, technology research company Gartner recently forecast that cybersecurity spending will increase from $183.7 billion in 2024 to $293.9 billion in 2028.
With cyberattacks not going away and spending set to rise, let's look at two cybersecurity stocks that investors can buy and hold for the next decade.
CrowdStrike
Despite its well publicized outage last year, CrowdStrike (CRWD 0.58%) is still considered to be the leader in endpoint security, where its Falcon platform in used by organizations to help protect networks and their endpoints, such as smartphones and computers, from cybersecurity attacks. The company was named the Gartner magic quadrant leader in endpoint security for 2024, its fifth-straight year at the top for both the completeness of its vision and ability to execute.
In an environment where organizations are beginning to consolidate their cybersecurity solutions onto a few or even a single platform, that is a good position to be in. This has helped the company continue to expand the number of its modules that customers are using. As of last quarter, two-thirds of its customers had five of more of its modules, while 20% were using 8 or more. Its Cloud Security, Identity Security, and LogScale Next-Gen SIEM modules in particular have been gaining a lot of traction.
While the outage has had an impact on the company causing extended sales cycles and more deal scrutiny, it has continued to gain both new customers and grow within its existing customer base, as shown by its 115% net dollar retention last quarter. CrowdStrike has also offered impacted customers what it calls customer commitment packages that includes a combination of new modules, added subscription time, and flexible payment terms (Flex dollars) to help compensate them for the outage. This can also be a selling point to eventually get customers to keep and pay for those modules.
Despite the effect of the outage on its business, CrowdStrike has still been strongly growing its revenue. Last quarter, its overall revenue climbed 29%, with subscription revenue up 31%. Its annual recurring revenue (ARR), meanwhile, jumped 27%.
Trading at a forward price-to-sales (P/S) multiple of nearly 18.7 times next fiscal year's (ending January 2026) analyst estimates, CrowdStrike's stock is not cheap. However, the company has proven to be the leader in the cybersecurity space and deserves to trade at a premium.
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Zscaler
While CrowdStrike's main focus is on endpoint security, Zscaler's (ZS -0.65%) platform centers around zero trust. Zero trust is the cybersecurity concept that no individual user nor device should be trusted, and as such that all users must be verified, authorized, and continuously validated.
Zero trust has been one of the fastest-growing areas of cybersecurity the past few years, with Gartner having previously forecast that Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) spending would grow to $4 billion in 2027, which would be a more than 30% compounded annual growth rate between 2021 and 2027. More recently, it sees the entire Identity Access Management space, which zero trust is a part of, growing from $17.7 billion in 2024 to $25.4 billion in 2028.
Zscaler has been seeing strong revenue growth, including 26% last quarter. Similar to CrowdStrike, the company has been doing a good job upselling additional modules to its existing customer base. Last quarter, its net dollar retention was a solid 114%. It is seeing strong uptake of its Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) solution, which gives all users seamless zero-trust connectivity and has been replacing virtual private networks (VPNs). It is also seeing nice traction with its Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX), Zero Trust for Branch and Cloud, and AI analytics solutions.
The company is also looking toward the data security market as an opportunity, and last quarter it won a deal to protect a customer's Microsoft Copilot data. This was just a single deal, but the company has a lot of integration with Microsoft so more of these types of deals could be in the future.
Zscaler is also making big strides within the federal government. It said it is now in 14 of the 15 cabinet-level agencies, as the government is turning towards zero trust to improve security while reducing costs by being able to eliminate firewalls and VPNs. It said it sees a significant upsell opportunities in the future as a result.
The stock trades at a forward P/S ratio of 9.2 times fiscal 2026 (ending July 2026) analyst estimates. That's a reasonable valuation give its growth and the opportunities in front of it.
