Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ:PANW), CyberArk (NASDAQ:CYBR) and several other cybersecurity companies were in focus on Tuesday as investment firm Stephens launched coverage of the sector.

CyberArk, Zscaler (NASDAQ:ZS), CrowdStrike (CRWD) and SentinelOne (NYSE:S) were given Overweight ratings, while CheckPoint Software (CHKP), Fortinet (FTNT), Okta (OKTA), Palo Alto, Rapid7 (RPD) and Tenable (TENB) were assigned Equal-Weight ratings. The firm added that CyberArk, which was given a $440 price target, is its best idea.

Other price targets include Check Point ($255), CrowdStrike ($450), Fortinet ($108), Okta ($127), Palo Alto ($205), Zscaler ($255), Rapid7 ($33), SentinelOne ($25) and Tenable ($42).

"We believe cyber continues to be a large and attractive market," analysts at the firm wrote. "Cyber threats continue to escalate in terms of volume and sophistication, a dynamic that we believe is only accelerating as the attack surface has expanded and become more distributed. This is being driven by secular trends including cloud (SaaS, public cloud, cloud-native apps) and work-from-anywhere." 

The analysts pointed to four specific areas of cybersecurity that are likely to continue being a tailwind: identity security; the shift to consuming network security as a cloud service versus on-premise; cloud security; and next-gen opportunities, driven largely by the replacement cycles focused on artificial intelligence, cloud and the "emergence of more modern solutions," such as data security and security operations platforms.