Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Originally published by ChannelPro. There is an ongoing debate in the cybersecurity industry about whether vendors should go directly to customers or instead become a part of a wider partnership network. The standard argument is that consolidation of platforms and AI-driven cost-of-service delivery makes the traditional model of a channel ecosystem redundant. However, this is largely incorrect, at least when it comes to the SMB and mid-market segments where most UK businesses sit.

Threat hunting has become a cornerstone of modern cybersecurity programs. As organizations collect increasing volumes of telemetry across endpoints, cloud environments, identities, applications, and networks, hunting teams have unprecedented visibility into potential adversary activity.

Summer might mean slightly fewer meetings, lighter inboxes, and the illusion of breathing room (in a perfect world), but we all know that attackers don’t take vacations, so neither should the fundamentals that keep your organization secure. If anything, now is the perfect time to tackle the “homework” that often gets pushed aside during busier quarters. Recent incident patterns continue to reinforce a straightforward reality: breaches are rarely the result of a single control failure.

When people think about cybersecurity, they usually think about protecting passwords, laptops, or email accounts. Phone numbers don't make the list very often. Maybe they should. A phone number by itself isn't especially dangerous. Someone can't hack your phone simply because they know your number. But it is often the starting point for a much larger attack.

Most security providers can describe what they should be able to do. Fewer can demonstrate what they actually see, track, and respond to in live environments. That distinction matters more now than it did even a year ago. Attack surfaces have expanded beyond users and endpoints into machine identities, autonomous systems, and internet-facing infrastructure rapidly. At the same time, detection claims have become broader (often without a corresponding increase in observable capability).

For years, enterprise security focused on protecting users, endpoints, applications and data. Today another identity is entering the enterprise. AI agents. Unlike traditional chatbots that simply answer questions, modern AI agents can perform tasks on behalf of users. They can search corporate knowledge, summarize documents, create reports, interact with business applications and, with appropriate permissions, execute multi-step workflows.

Incident response doesn’t always start with a dramatic alert or a perfectly framed timeline. More often, it starts with uncertainty. Something feels off. An executive notices unusual activity in their inbox. A user reports a login they don’t recognize. Suspicious emails have been sent. Data may or may not have been accessed. The facts are incomplete, the questions are piling up, and the pressure is already building.

I have lost count of the post-incident reviews where the most painful conversation was not about the breach itself. It was about the retainer. A CISO realizes the prepaid hours expired six weeks before the intrusion began. A General Counsel discovers the retained firm is not on the cyber insurance panel and the claim is now in dispute. A board member asks why an organization that paid for "preparedness" spent the first eighteen hours of an incident negotiating scope.

In Part 1, we covered onboarding Microsoft-native agents and SaaS AI platforms — the paths that need configuration, not code. Now we look at connecting agents that have no native integration — self-built frameworks and agents you build and run yourself. If an agent is missing from the M365 admin center inventory and the import-agents feature doesn’t support it, then the Microsoft Agent 365 SDK may be needed.

Agent usage is exploding and in Microsoft 365, agents aren’t monitored by default. Even though it’s early days for tools that can monitor agents, Microsoft’s newly released Agent 365 evolves this new category with some powerful capabilities. Here are some tips for using Microsoft Agent 365 and related tools to monitor agents. Solutions discussed in this post: This is part 1 of a two-part series.