Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The workplace has fundamentally changed. Employees work from home, customer locations, airports, coffee shops, hotels, and virtually anywhere with an internet connection. At the same time, the applications they depend on are spread across Microsoft 365, SaaS platforms, private cloud environments, corporate data centers, and on-premises business applications. For managed service providers (MSPs), this represents one of the largest recurring revenue opportunities available today.

MSPs are operating in an increasingly demanding environment. Every client they onboard adds more applications, identities, endpoints, cloud services, data, and third-party dependencies. All of this drives up the daily operational workload that teams have to absorb.

Generative AI has quickly moved from experimentation to everyday business use. Employees use AI tools to create content, write code, analyze data, automate repetitive tasks, and interact with business applications in entirely new ways. At the same time, software vendors are embedding AI capabilities into the products organizations already use every day, often without requiring users to adopt separate tools.

We’re proud to announce that two WatchGuard leaders have been named to CRN’s Top 100 Executives list for 2026, recognizing their leadership, innovation, and commitment to the channel. This year’s honorees are: Each year, CRN’s Top 100 Executives list celebrates leaders who are shaping the future of the IT industry through their vision, business leadership, and commitment to the partner ecosystem.

For years, phishing has worked for one simple reason: it exploits the weakest link, the user. The defensive strategy has followed the same formula: better email filtering, more user awareness, and an extra layer of authentication. It wasn't perfect, but it was a workable balance.

One particularly concerning trend in the recent evolution of phishing is the rise of QR code-based attacks. It doesn't rely on new malware or sophisticated exploits. Instead, it takes advantage of something much simpler: the trust users place in QR codes every day. Over the last few months, QR codes have become one of the most popular tactics for steering users toward malicious sites on mobile devices or in browser environments, where the visibility of many security tools is very limited.

For years, the cybersecurity industry has assumed that the primary challenge was to see more, detect better, and deploy increasingly sophisticated tools. That paradigm no longer reflects the reality of today's cybersecurity operations. Organizations have never had so much visibility into their attack surface or so many capabilities to identify threats. However, the rapid evolution of AI is increasing the speed and complexity of attacks to a point where detection alone is no longer enough.

Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming one of the most transformative technologies in cybersecurity. Unfortunately, it's not transforming the industry exclusively for defenders. Attackers are already experimenting with AI to accelerate reconnaissance, analyze software for vulnerabilities, develop fully-functional exploits, and automate nearly all parts of the attack lifecycle.

The cybersecurity conversation usually revolves around attacks. We talk about ransomware, phishing, and critical vulnerabilities—but there is a much less visible problem that is limiting many organizations' ability to respond: operational complexity. Today, a single company might rely on dozens of security tools, manage workloads spread across multiple cloud providers, handle hundreds or thousands of digital identities, and support employees connecting from absolutely anywhere.

For years, the VPN has been the default answer to remote access. It solved a problem organizations faced when employees primarily worked from offices and only occasionally connected from home. That world no longer exists. Today, employees work from everywhere. Applications run across SaaS platforms, public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises environments. Security teams are expected to provide seamless access while protecting against increasingly sophisticated attacks.

Security teams today face an overwhelming volume of alerts, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish genuine threats from everyday noise. As attackers become more adept at blending into legitimate activity, organizations need smarter ways to prioritize, investigate, and respond.

For years, cybersecurity has largely focused on strengthening technology. Organizations invested in better endpoint protection, stronger identity controls, advanced threat detection, and AI-powered security operations. Those investments remain essential, but they're no longer enough. The next major cybersecurity challenge isn't simply keeping pace with attackers. It's keeping pace with how people work.

Artificial intelligence is transforming cybersecurity, and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are at the forefront of that evolution. That's why we're launching the WatchGuard AI Innovation Challenge, an opportunity for MSPs to share ideas for AI agents and automations that help security teams work smarter, operate more efficiently, and better protect their customers.

For years, VPNs have been the standard for securing remote access. But today's hybrid work environments, cloud applications, and evolving cyber threats have exposed the limitations of a security model built on implicit trust. Once a user authenticates through a traditional VPN, they often gain broad access to the corporate network. If those credentials are compromised, attackers can move laterally, access sensitive resources, and escalate an attack. Zero Trust takes a different approach.

It's 4 p.m. and a client calls. It's an employee's last day, and you need to make sure they no longer have access to company environments, applications, systems, sensitive information—or even the corporate laptop. You remove VPN access. Then remote desktop access. Then access to applications and internal systems. Multiple locations, multiple consoles, and it only takes missing one of them to leave a door open. Now multiply that by the number of clients you manage.

The biggest challenge in cybersecurity is no longer just detecting threats. It's doing so before time runs out. Artificial intelligence is no longer confined to automating isolated tasks within an attack. It is enabling threats to operate as continuous systems that can adapt, coordinate, and evolve in real time, drastically reducing the time security teams have to react. This shift is doing more than simply increasing the volume of offensive activity.