Redmond Channel Partner

News Cybersecurity company Fortra reported on October 8 that phishing attacks involving remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools increased by 475 percent during the first nine months of 2026 compared to the previous year. The findings, published by Fortra Intelligence and Research Experts (FIRE), highlight a growing problem for IT security teams: attackers don't necessarily need malicious software to take control of a device.

Tech Talk | How Microsoft Partners Put Priority Plays to Work Date: Thursday, October 22 at 11am PT / 2pm ET A target account list is not a sales strategy. Microsoft partners know what their practice is good at, and Partner Center provides them a list of scored accounts. Connecting the two, account by account, is where it stalls. Reps call the customers they know; the list gets stale, and the same play becomes a different pitch in every inbox. What does it take to turn those lists into pipeline?

News Microsoft is pushing Copilot beyond answering questions and generating documents, adding capabilities that let employees create lightweight business applications and hand off work that can continue running without them. The changes move Copilot closer to becoming a general-purpose workspace for both AI-assisted and autonomous tasks. The redesigned Copilot experience centers on three components: Home, Code and Autopilot.

Tech Spotlight | Building a Future-Proof Microsoft 365 Security Practice Part Four of the Cybersecurity Tech Spotlight Series Date: Wednesday, October 28 at 11 am PT / 2 pm ET Most channel security practices don't fail on tooling. They fail because they were built bespoke per client, carried in two people's heads, and rebuilt from scratch every time a vendor, a rule or a Microsoft default changed. 2026 made that expensive.

News As AI agents gain access to enterprise applications, APIs and infrastructure, security teams face a new network problem: controlling what autonomous software can communicate with, what data it can move and which actions it should be permitted to take. Firewall vendors are responding by extending traditional network controls into the emerging world of agentic AI.

News Microsoft is giving Copilot in PowerPoint more control over how AI-generated presentations look and how they are assembled, adding capabilities intended to reduce the manual work required to turn generated content into a finished business deck. The company unveiled Brand Kit and new Copilot Skills on Sept. 14.

News The biggest financial beneficiaries of the AI boom may not be the models attracting most of the attention. As companies race to put AI into production, the servers, chips, networks, cloud capacity and other systems needed to run those workloads are consuming a far larger share of spending. Gartner expects worldwide AI spending to reach $2.67 trillion in 2026, up 49.5 percent from last year.

What Happens When Threats Strike After Hours? Why 24/7 MDR Changes Everything On Demand Cyber threats don’t keep business hours, making around-the-clock detection and response critical for protecting today’s organizations. In this webinar, we explore how 24/7 MDR combines real-time threat detection with human-led investigation, containment and remediation across both endpoints and cloud environments.

Tech Spotlight | How To Operationalize Microsoft 365 Protection Across Customers Part Three of the Cybersecurity Tech Spotlight Series Date: Wednesday, October 21 at 11 am PT / 2 pm ET The fact that Microsoft 365 needs more protection than the platform ships with keeps us all in business! But not every MSP has turned that knowledge into repeatable, scalable offerings that can be deployed and operated the same way across every customer, every tenant, every time.

3 Signs It's Time to Consolidate Your Stack Too many security tools can lead to alert fatigue, rising costs, and slower response times. This guide helps MSPs identify when tool sprawl is working against them and how a more unified security stack can improve efficiency, visibility, and threat response. Download now!