Microsoft Security Partners: Strategic Growth & Opportunities in FY26

The role of a Microsoft security partner has never been more vital or more promising. At MCAPS 2025, Microsoft unveiled a wave of new investments and innovations in AI-powered security, with a clear message: partners are central to building a safer digital world. From advancements in Microsoft Defender to strategic go-to-market support, these announcements highlight the growing opportunity for every Microsoft security partner to lead in the next era of cybersecurity. As AI reshapes the threat landscape, strong, scalable security solutions and the partners who deliver them are more essential than ever.

Table of Contents:

• The Urgent Call to Action: Cybersecurity Threats in the Age of AI

• Microsoft's Strategy for Secure AI Transformation: Guiding the Customer Journey

• Partner Success in Action: SHI International's Transformative Journey

• Microsoft's Continued Investment in its Security Partner Ecosystem

Key Takeaways for Microsoft Security Partners

• Cyber threats are escalating rapidly, fueled by sophisticated Gen AI capabilities, making your expertise more critical than ever.

• Microsoft cannot tackle these challenges alone; security partners are fundamental to protecting customers and maximizing security tool usage.

• Microsoft's strategy focuses on enabling secure AI transformation through three critical customer conversations: Modern Security Operations, Data Protection, and Cloud/AI Security.

• There's a significant opportunity in the SMB/SME segment, supported by new, more accessible CSP options.

• SHI International's success demonstrates that addressing security concerns directly unlocks AI adoption and business value for customers.

• To succeed, Microsoft security partners must deeply understand customer needs, align with Microsoft's strategic priorities, and invest in building strong service capabilities.

• Microsoft is increasing investments (over 15% YoY) in sales, marketing, new SKUs, and skilling to support partner growth in security.

• Leading with data security is key to building customer confidence and unlocking the broader AI opportunity, including Copilot.

The Urgent Call to Action: Cybersecurity Threats in the Age of AI

The current cybersecurity numbers are genuinely concerning. Since 2022, password attacks have surged more than tenfold. Cybercrime, if it were a country, would shockingly rank as the world's third-largest economy, growing rapidly at 15% annually. Attacks are becoming faster, bigger, and more advanced, affecting both customers and internal teams. For instance, after a phishing email click, attackers can gain access to private data in just 1 hour and 12 minutes.

The sheer scale is immense: password attacks nearly doubled from 4,000 to 7,000 per second in just one year. Microsoft are now tracking over 1,500 major threat actors, a five-fold increase since 2023. Adding to this complexity are the growing global rules and regulations.

The rise of Generative AI (Gen AI) presents a dual challenge and opportunity. While it offers immense benefits in speed and accuracy, it also creates new risks. By 2025, Gen AI is projected to produce 10% of all data. Sadly, attackers are also leveraging this technology, often outperforming traditional defenses. Protecting at "machine speed" is now essential; for example, Gen AI can copy someone's voice with just three seconds of audio, facilitating sophisticated phishing attacks, password breaches, and malware distribution.

Microsoft is the largest security company globally, protecting over 1 million customers and having invested $20 billion over the past five years, with a dedicated team of 34,000 security engineers. However, Microsoft unequivocally states: "Microsoft can't do this alone". Microsoft security partners are indispensable in helping customers stay protected and maximize the value of their security tools.

Organizations face significant hurdles that create clear opportunities for partners:

• Tool Sprawl: Most organizations juggle around 80 different security tools that need to work seamlessly together, sharing data and being easy to manage.

• Talent Shortage: There's a global deficit of approximately 4 million security professionals.

• AI Data Concerns: Nearly one in three business leaders is worried about data loss due to AI usage, with "what happens with my data?" being a primary customer concern when discussing AI.

Working together, Microsoft and its security partners can effectively shift the balance in favour of defenders.

Microsoft's Strategy for Secure AI Transformation: Guiding the Customer Journey

Microsoft's core focus this year is to help every customer scale securely with AI. This involves having the right conversations and leading with enhanced solutions and incident response to ensure customers gain the full value from the Microsoft platform. Crucially, security is not a standalone conversation; it is embedded by design and at the core of the entire AI story.

For fiscal year 2026, Microsoft has simplified its solution approach to reflect real customer challenges, allowing Microsoft security partners to focus on areas of greatest impact. There are three critical customer conversations where partners can lead:

Modern Security Operations in the Age of AI:

This conversation progresses naturally through three key steps:

• Protecting the fundamentals: Securing email, access management, and all endpoints.

• Advanced identity applications: Leveraging Extended Detection and Response (XDR).

• Security analytics: Utilizing SIEM platforms for rapid and accurate attack response, enhancing defense and hunting capabilities with AI.

• Data Protection (Especially Crucial for AI Adoption): As AI integration grows, data protection becomes paramount. Key steps include:

  • Understanding data landscape and identity: Knowing what data should be used where and what truly needs protection.

  • Applying flexible protection: Implementing encryption, access restrictions, and visual markings for critical business continuity data.

  • Preventing data loss: Detecting risky behavior and preventing accidental oversharing of sensitive information.

  • Governing data compliantly: Automatically retaining, deleting, and storing data and records in adherence to global regulations, thereby reducing business risk.

• Cloud and AI Security: AI accelerates the journey to the cloud, but also highlights vulnerabilities. This conversation focuses on:

  • Protecting all elements of AI design, including applications and data migrated and modernized in the cloud.

  • Layered protection: Securing the platform, data, application, and AI layers.

  • Comprehensive posture view: Providing an end-to-end perspective on security posture and potential risk exposure to ensure nothing is missed.

  • Ultimately, this gives customers the confidence to innovate without slowdowns or setbacks.

    
    

A significant growth opportunity for Microsoft security partners lies in the Small and Medium Business (SMB/SME) segment. Microsoft are strongly focused on bringing advanced security capabilities to these customers, and to make this more accessible, Microsoft have introduced 3-year CSP options for ME5 and security suites, offering affordability and flexibility. Microsoft is also expanding its robust partner ecosystem by collaborating with Managed Security Services Providers (MSSPs) and Global System Integrators (GSIs) to accelerate adoption, and with Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to protect more cloud AI platforms and applications.

Microsoft's Continued Investment in its Security Partner Ecosystem

Microsoft is significantly increasing its commitment to empowering its security partner ecosystem. Microsoft is investing more than 15% year-over-year to help you grow your security business. These increased investments reflect the immense market opportunity ahead.

Microsoft's commitment includes:

Enhanced Sales & Marketing Support

Microsoft provide AI-driven propensity tools to help you identify new customers and uncover upsell/cross-sell opportunities. Resources like "Campaign in the Box" and expanded pre-sales investments will help you build a pipeline and demonstrate the value of a comprehensive security portfolio.

New CSP SKUs

To further support your growth as a CSP partner, Microsoft has introduced three CSP SKUs for Microsoft 365, ME3, ME5, E5 security, and compliance mini-suites, designed to offer long-term value and flexibility while strengthening customer security and compliance.

Skilling and Go-to-Market Support

As AI becomes more deeply embedded, data protection is critical. Microsoft are investing further in skilling and go-to-market support, especially in data protection, to help partners lead with trust and confidently scale Copilot experiences.

Conclusion

As Microsoft doubles down on AI-powered security and trusted partner collaboration, the window of opportunity has never been wider for Microsoft security partners. The message is clear: organizations can’t face the rising wave of AI-enabled threats alone. They need partners who not only understand the Microsoft ecosystem but can also deliver scalable, secure, and customer-centric solutions across all industries.

From SMBs to large enterprises, every customer is navigating complexity, compliance, and cost pressures. Whether it's through modern security operations, AI-embedded data protection, or end-to-end cloud security strategies, partners like you have the power to lead.