What a couple of days in Cascais!
Last week, Microsoft hosted its first-ever EMEA Executive Partner Connect dedicated entirely to security for SMBs, and CloudGuard was proud to be one of just three sponsors who helped bring it to life.
Being selected as a sponsor for an event of this calibre isn’t something we take for granted. Microsoft brought together product experts, security leaders, and a carefully chosen group of partners to tackle one of the most important questions in cybersecurity right now: how do we better protect SMB customers in the AI era?
The conversation kept coming back to one theme: the security confidence gap.
The distance between how protected organisations feel, often based on untested, unproven assumptions, and how their defences actually hold up when tested or under real attack. For SMBs especially, that gap can be the difference between surviving an incident and not.
According to the UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025/26, 46% of small businesses experienced a cyber security breach or attack in the last 12 months, yet fewer than half (44%) have a business continuity plan that covers cybersecurity.
The tech exists. What’s missing for most SMBs is a clear, affordable way to actually use it.
This is exactly what CloudGuard’s Security Done Different approach is built for, a clear starting point and a structured path to keep improving, for every business, not just the ones with enterprise budgets.
The energy in the room confirmed what we already believe, the security industry is finally taking SMBs seriously. And we intend to be at the forefront of that shift.
Thank you to Microsoft, to Nikoleta Gamanova and Sharon Holzmann for organising an outstanding event, and to everyone who stopped to talk, those conversations are always the best part.
If any of this resonates, we’d love to chat.
