What Cyber Threat Reports Mean for the Channel

29th April 2026 4 minute read

Recent Cyber Threat and Data Resilience research points to a shift many New Zealand partners are already seeing in customer conversations. While incidents continue to rise in volume and sophistication, the more meaningful change sits in how organisations now define impact, and what they expect from their technology partners as a result.

Cyber incidents are no longer treated as purely IT issues. They affect how a business operates, how quickly it can recover, and the level of trust it maintains with customers and regulators. As environments become more complex, partners are increasingly being pulled into conversations spanning security, risk, and operational continuity.

The themes below reflect consistent patterns emerging across recent global and ANZ threat and resilience research, including Cloudflare’s 2026 Threat Report, CrowdStrike’s 2026 Global Threat Report, and Omdia research published in Commvault’s State of Data Resilience Australia & New Zealand 2026 report, and what those patterns mean in practice for New Zealand partners.

Cybersecurity Is Closely Linked to Business Risk and Continuity

Cybersecurity is increasingly treated as a business risk rather than a standalone technical function. This shift is most visible in regulated and customer‑facing sectors, where accountability for cyber resilience is extending beyond IT teams into executive and operational leadership.

Omdia’s Commvault ANZ resilience research shows these discussions are now happening at a board level, with organisations prioritising their ability to maintain minimum viable operations during disruption rather than attempting to prevent every incident outright.

Rather than focusing solely on compliance, organisations are placing greater emphasis on whether critical systems can continue operating when disruption occurs. This has brought recovery outcomes and operational dependencies into senior level risk conversations, reflecting the role resilience now plays in business confidence.

CrowdStrike’s Threat Report reinforces this shift, showing adversaries move faster and rely heavily on trusted systems and valid credentials, increasing the business impact of even short outages.

Identity and Cloud Access Are Central to Modern Risk

One of the clearest signals across current threat research is the move away from exploit led attacks toward the misuse of legitimate access. Identity credentials, SaaS sessions, APIs, and trusted integrations are now common entry points, allowing attackers to operate inside environments while appearing legitimate.

CrowdStrike’s Report illustrates this clearly, with approximately 82% of detections in 2025 being malware free, relying instead on valid accounts, trusted services, and existing access paths.

As identity becomes the dominant intrusion vector, access across SaaS and cloud environments is playing a much bigger role in cyber risk. Cloudflare’s research reinforces this shift, highlighting how malicious activity increasingly blends into normal cloud and SaaS traffic.

For many New Zealand organisations, particularly across SMB and midmarket environments, cloud and SaaS adoption has accelerated faster than access visibility and governance. Internal teams often lack a clear view of how access is granted and monitored across platforms, placing identity management at the centre of modern security conversations.

Recovery Readiness Is Becoming a Measure of Cyber Maturity

Across global and ANZ resilience research, cyber maturity is increasingly measured by outcomes rather than intent. The focus is shifting from whether incidents can be prevented to how quickly organisations can recover and continue operating.

In New Zealand, this is most evident in customer facing and regulated environments, where expectations around availability and data integrity are high. Commvault's report shows that data shows recovery metrics such as restoration time and confidence in data integrity are now discussed alongside enterprise risk and governance, rather than remaining purely technical measures.

A persistent challenge is the gap between confidence and reality. More than 80% of ANZ executives expect to be operational again within five days of a major incident, while the average return to minimum operations remains closer to 28 days.

This disconnect continues to drive reassessment of backup strategies, recovery testing, and partner involvement in validating assumptions before incidents occur.

Complexity Is Shaping Customer Expectations

Most New Zealand organisations now run across on‑prem, cloud, and SaaS environments. While this brings flexibility, it also adds complexity that lean internal teams are often left to manage.

As environments become more fragmented, it’s harder to keep tools and priorities aligned. Customers are feeling that pressure and are looking for simpler, more structured approaches to security and recovery.

ANZ data reinforces this complexity, around 67% of organisations operate in hybrid or multi‑cloud environments, a model consistently linked to increased recovery complexity, reduced visibility, and greater reliance on external partners.

What These Insights Mean for Partners

Taken together, these themes reflect a consistent customer challenge: knowing where to focus, how to prioritise risk, and how security and resilience capabilities fit together in practice.

Threat and resilience research gives partners a shared, neutral foundation for these conversations. The value lies not in the reports themselves, but in how the data connects cybersecurity decisions to business outcomes such as uptime, stability, and trust, supporting more grounded, outcome‑led discussions.

For many organisations, this context helps clarify why certain risks matter, what an appropriate level of resilience looks like, and how to move forward in a practical, considered way.

How Dicker Data Supports Partners in New Zealand

At Dicker Data, we see these same trends reflected across the New Zealand market and work closely with partners to translate threat insights into practical customer ready outcomes.

Our Cybersecurity and Backup team supports partners with:

Local, New Zealand based expertise aligned to current threat and resilience patterns
Enablement, technical insight, and vendor alignment to support customer engagement
Partner through marketing support to help drive awareness and opportunity within partners’ customer bases

To learn more about how our Cybersecurity and Backup portfolio supports these insights, and how our vendors and partner through initiatives can help you build and grow a sustainable security practice, connect with the Dicker Data Cybersecurity & Backup team at sales@dickerdata.co.nz.

Dan Wehner

Head of Software - Dicker Data NZ

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