SHI Microsoft Security Practice Leader on 2026 Growth

Microsoft is deepening its security portfolio and leveraging AI to help customers stay ahead of threats. 

We spoke with Caleb McDowell, the practice manager for Microsoft security at SHI, about his experience with Microsoft’s security stack and how AI and other trends are shaping how customer organizations approach security tooling.

How Microsoft Ignite 2025 accelerated the company’s AI-driven security strategy

At Microsoft’s annual conference in November, the company doubled down on its security and AI investments, with solutions across the suite designed to address the needs of security teams and channel partners.

Among its many announcements, Microsoft announced updates to Purview and several of its AI agents and Copilot features. It has also expanded its Foundry program to address a range of agentic AI-related security concerns, including identity-related risks.

To some, the news out of Ignite represents Microsoft’s continued investments in becoming a security powerhouse on par with others in the space. Much of that comes in the form of predictive capabilities across the tooling that teams are already using and securing AI deployments for those who have joined the agentic journey.

“Some of it is now Microsoft saying, ‘we’ll do it for you,’ when it comes to the predictive AI now embedded in the suite,” McDowell said. “Then there’s Agent 365, which is offering a centralized view for the whole lifecycle of AI. It’s all important as a whole.”

The channel angle: how AI is driving different business conversations with customers

For channel partners, the rapid expansion of AI-enabled security tooling is reshaping customer expectations and partner service models. As enterprises accelerate adoption of agentic AI and cloud-native defenses, they’re increasingly looking to solution providers not just for product expertise but for guidance on risk governance, identity strategy, and tool consolidation. 

These pressures are driving a renewed focus on Microsoft’s ecosystem, where partners capable of operationalizing AI-driven security controls are seeing heightened demand for assessment, deployment, and ongoing optimization services.

Why SHI launched a dedicated Microsoft security practice in 2025

SHI is a global reseller and services provider that has served customers across a variety of verticals for decades, but the practice division McDowell leads is relatively new to SHI’s vast portfolio of services and technologies.

The group was formed in April of 2025 to bring customers a full-fledged, innovative services offering built on Microsoft tooling, many of which were already paid for in some capacity through their other technology investments.

As McDowell explains, companies already under E5 licensing and deploying Microsoft products in their workflows often have security tools in their environments that are either dormant or underutilized.

SHI wants to enable its customers to unlock additional resources and leverage Microsoft’s agentic AI capabilities to improve security across the organization more efficiently.

“SHI has an amazing opportunity to be a services powerhouse,” said McDowell. “We’re all working across the team, pulling in resources on Entra ID or Intune or anything when we realize our customer needs additional support, and it’s really exciting to see us all working in parallel like this.”

This approach also extends to the internal teams of the customers SHI supports. As McDowell notes, aspects of IT, data governance, and security are converging and now require teams to work collaboratively where they were previously siloed.

“Purview, for example, used to be a GRC tool and a governance issue, really. But now it’s technically a security tool, and teams who handle networking and infrastructure, because of AI, now also have to be pulled in to security discussions,” McDowell said.

“We always tell our customers that they should welcome other teams onto calls with us. Most IT professionals like learning new things anyway, and it helps when everyone can understand not just why something needs to be done but how their work impacts the security overall,” he continued.

AI for security, security for AI: what SHI sees in the market

McDowell says the company is still educating its customer base about the capabilities available in the Microsoft suite and, generally speaking, about AI capabilities in security. Along the way, he says, it has become clear that the requirements and opportunities for security and IT teams are changing.

“AI is changing the learning curve required to be a security professional,” McDowell said. “We are also all just moving at light speed now because of AI, and nobody knows what they don’t know.”

McDowell calls Security Copilot and the recent announcements around it “criminally understated” in terms of the value it can bring to businesses. The tool provides a natural-language, assistive experience that enables security professionals to be more efficient across incident response, threat hunting, intelligence gathering, and other key tasks.

To McDowell, the efficiency gains are crucial as organizations face an expensive labor market that is sometimes short of the sheer number of skilled professionals required.

“We just don’t have enough people to sit in these chairs and perform these tasks everywhere they are needed. And then, when they do exist, not all companies can afford the salaries they expect to do some of the advanced security work,” said McDowell.

“But now, you could take a tier 1 technician and, with tools like Security Copilot and all of the integrations, that tech can actually perform the more advanced tasks because of the natural language capabilities and the way it’s trained,” he continued.

What’s next for Microsoft’s security ecosystem and SHI’s 2026 outlook

McDowell has spent much of his career focused on the Microsoft security suite, something he said used to earn him questions and odd looks from peers. Now, though, he sees the tide changing on respect for, and interest in, how the tech giant is approaching security needs.

He also thinks the company and its myriad partners are still at the early stages of growth in the capabilities and market share Microsoft can build for itself in a crowded arena.

“I think that we, as in everyone kind of around and within Microsoft security, haven’t even scratched the surface of where this is going to go,” said McDowell.

“2026 is going to be a massive year for us at SHI, and I think just generally for the opportunities ahead,” he said.