The latest Five Eyes cybersecurity guidance highlights a growing reality for organisations: cyber threats are evolving faster, and AI is accelerating the speed at which attacks can occur.
What is Five Eyes?
Five Eyes is an intelligence-sharing alliance between Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.
The alliance also plays an important role in cyber defence by providing coordinated insights into emerging threats and cybersecurity trends.
The guidance encourages organisations to assume cyber incidents will happen and focus on cyber resilience, ensuring they can respond, recover and maintain business operations when attacks occur.
"With the evolving cyber landscape, customers need trusted advisers, not just technology suppliers. As cyber threats become faster and more complex, partners have an opportunity to deliver lasting value through risk assessments, security roadmaps, managed services, and ongoing cyber resilience programs. The organisations that invest in a long-term security strategy today will be far better positioned to navigate tomorrow's threat landscape, and partners have a critical role to play in that journey."- Simon Tabrum, Business Manager - Software, Dicker Data NZ
Three Key Takeaways from the Five Eyes Guidance
AI Is Accelerating Cyber Threats
The window between vulnerability disclosure and exploitation continues to shrink. As attacks become faster and more sophisticated, organisations need greater visibility, automation and preparedness.
Resilience Must Be a Business Priority
The focus is shifting from preventing every attack to ensuring organisations can recover quickly and maintain business continuity when incidents occur.
Security Fundamentals Still Matter
Patch management, access controls, legacy system modernisation and incident response planning remain critical foundations of a strong security strategy.
The Partner Opportunity
For channel partners, the Five Eyes guidance presents an opportunity to help customers move beyond product discussions and focus on business outcomes.
Customers are increasingly looking for trusted advisors who can help them reduce complexity, strengthen cyber resilience and prepare for the challenges that AI-powered threats present. Partners that can align security investments to operational and business outcomes will be best positioned to drive long-term customer success.
Industry Perspectives
To better understand how leading cybersecurity vendors are responding to these challenges, we asked experts across Dicker Data's security ecosystem to share their perspectives.
Cloudflare: AI Has Compressed the Security Timeline
"The Five Eyes guidance points to something we see every day: when AI is accelerating the speed of attacks, complexity becomes your biggest enemy. You can't defend against modern, automated threats if you're relying on a patchwork of different security tools. That’s why our partnership with Dicker Data is so important, we're helping ANZ organizations move to a unified connectivity cloud, stripping away that complexity so they can secure their edge and just focus on running their business." - Pat Breen, Area Vice President, Australia & New Zealand, Cloudflare.
Citrix: Securing Access Is Critical
"The challenge identified by the Five Eyes agencies is clear: organisations must assume compromise and focus on resilience. Citrix Secure Access with Google Chrome Enterprise addresses this by bringing Zero Trust Network Access, Secure Web Gateway, browser security and adaptive risk controls together in a single platform. As AI-driven threats continue to evolve, securing access to applications and data at the point where users work, the browser, is becoming one of the most effective ways to reduce exposure while maintaining productivity and business continuity." - Marcus Wieloch, Head of Technical, Citrix CXANZ.
Commvault: Recovery Is Part of Resilience
“Cyber resilience is the foundation of every successful digital business, especially as AI reshapes the threat landscape. Our 2026 State of Data Resilience research found that while organisations are eager to embrace AI, pressure to deploy quickly and limited trust in AI-driven decision-making can have unintended consequences for resilience. This is precisely why ResOps matters. It provides a disciplined operating model that aligns cyber recovery, security and operations so organisations can innovate at speed without compromising resilience.” - Gareth Russell, Security Field Chief Technology Officer, Commvault.
CrowdStrike:Prioritisation Turns Insight into Action
“This is ultimately a technical paper wrapped in a strategic message. The recommendations focus on security fundamentals such as identity, resilience, patching, and incident preparedness. What makes this increasingly important is the pace at which AI is changing the threat landscape. Solutions such as CrowdStrike AIDR help security teams cut through the noise, prioritise the risks that matter most, and focus remediation efforts where they will have the greatest impact on reducing organisational risk.” - Raoul Edmonds – Dicker Data Presales Specialist – Software.
Huntress: Recovery Confidence Matters
"As AI helps adversaries attack faster and at scale, security fundamentals like patching, access control, and response planning are critical. The Five Eyes guidance gives us a clear roadmap to move clients beyond point products and toward true cyber resilience. At Huntress, we help partners put that guidance into practice so they can prevent, detect, and respond to threats before they disrupt their clients' businesses." - Reece Appleton, Regional Director, APAC.
NetApp: Security and Recovery Must Work Together
"As the world's most secure storage company, NetApp is built on secure-by-design principles and zero trust architecture and remains the only storage vendor certified to host defence top-secret data. For nearly a decade, NetApp has fought AI-driven threats with AI, leveraging autonomous ransomware defence and pre-trained models for user behaviour analysis. To ensure cyber resilience, NetApp’s tamperproof snapshots combined with the industry's first and only ransomware recovery guarantee enable rapid recovery. Intelligent data classification reduces attack surface while driving cost and sustainability benefits. NetApp continues to innovate with future proof offerings, already leading in Post Quantum capabilities and defence against ever increasingly sophisticated attacks as the true last line of defence." - Chris Gondek, Solutions Engineering Manager ANZ, NetApp.
TrendAI: The Challenge Is Speed of Execution
“The Five Eyes statement isn't telling organisations to do anything they don't already know they should be doing, patch faster, cut attack surface, retire legacy systems, tighten access controls, prepare for incidents. What's changed is the timeline: AI has compressed it from years to months, and the window between vulnerability discovery and exploitation is shrinking faster than most security teams can keep pace with manually. The challenge is no longer knowing what "good" looks like. It's doing all of it, at once, urgently. The Five Eyes agencies are right, this isn't about new controls, it's about finally executing on the fundamentals, urgently. TrendAI's role is to make that urgency achievable: intelligent prioritization that tells teams exactly what to fix first, and virtual protection that buys them the time to do it properly." - Andrew Philip, Field CISO, ANZ, TrendAI™.
RSA: Identity Is the Foundation of Cyber Resilience
RSA strongly aligns with the Five Eyes cybersecurity guidance by helping organizations with high assurance cyber resilient authentication. RSA is the only vendor that offers a unique hybrid failover solution for always-on authentication. The Five Eyes letter calls for greater attention and an uplift of posture in identity and access controls and RSA supports organisations to go phishing resistant with MAC, Linux and Windows deployments across all architecture." - Jessica Murray - Partnerships and Alliances, ANZ, RSA Security.
Building Cyber Resilience Together
The latest Five Eyes guidance serves as a timely reminder that cybersecurity is no longer solely about preventing attacks, it's about ensuring organisations can withstand, recover from and adapt to them.
Don't wait for the next incident to start the conversation. Reach out to the Dicker Data Cyber Resiliency team to explore assessment, managed service, and security platform opportunities that can help your customers strengthen their cyber resilience while growing your services business.
