New for This week

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• Another 3 New vendors Supabase, Keeper and Factorial are added.
• Microsoft EoL section Updated for January 2027 - Update in April
• DarkWeb Weekly Intelligence Report #3 - Busy week for the Bad Guys
• Microsoft's M365 CoPilot changes - Pay for functionality lost
• Microsoft Savings Plan for Databases- Commit, and save (better use it!)
• Agent 365 Available 1 May - Still a license for humans (that is a thought!!!)
• Microsoft Dataverse Capacity updates - You get more!
• Azure SRE agents announced - You NEED us to check your bills!
• Dynamics Licensing guide updated - and a long list of new FAQ's
• Think you're good at spotting a phishing message? - You're in for a surprise!
• Phishing attacks for your AI - Your AI is not protecting you - don't relax!
• ARM to make own CPU's - The licensor becoming a competitor? thats interesting!

We scan the DarkWeb continuously for Hacker signals and Ransomware attacks.

Click above for the report from our live dashboard that we will publish weekly (but actually updated continuously).
This is part of the DarkWeb monitoring services included with many of BUI's managed services offerings. This report is live, and this is a "snapshot" of the top 10 events at 6:00pm Sunday.

Supabase, Keeper and Factorial have been added for this week.
See below for Linkedin

Try out our AI to see whats been added since launch.

Get all the releases for the next 4 weeks in South Africa.
"Hoppers" is now screening.

Next big movie for 2026 is "Hail Mary" is now playing, Michael is looking like it will be very good.

Update for rest of 2026 coming in April

Microsoft News This Week

Major M365 CoPilot Changes coming 15 April

Directions on Microsoft has published a paper about changes that are coming that will particularly affect users of CoPilot Chat. Some CoPilot features for enterprises are also being removed.
Directions goes on to point out that Microsoft plans to remove Basic Copilot from the Office apps for customers with over 2000 M365 seats. This will affect Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
Basic Copilot will still be available through the M365 Copilot app and in Outlook. 

These changes are still playing out, and Microsoft still has to clarify whether CoPilot will be restricted in Office Apps for Basic/Unlicensed users.
It seems that suspicions of Microsoft throttling its service in favour of premium users are also proving to be correct. 


Please contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our experts, who can help you understand how you may be affected and what changes you may need to make to your licensing if you wish to continue using CoPilots Office integration features.

Microsoft Savings Plan for Databases

Microsoft has launched a new Azure Savings Plan for Databases. The model is familiar, commit to a set hourly spend and Microsoft gives you better rates in return. This one applies across a range of database services, including Azure SQL Database and Azure Cosmos DB. It is available through the Azure Management Portal, though for now only as a 1-year commitment.
Please contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our Azure experts to maximise your banafits from this savings plan.

Agent 365 Available 1 May

Agent 365........ License still attached to a human! 
It is the control plane for AI agents, giving each one a Microsoft Entra Agent ID and bringing governance, visibility, and management into the Microsoft 365 admin centre. Right now it sits in the Frontier preview programme, where tenants are provisioned with 25 Agent 365 Frontier licences for agent instances. From 1 May 2026 it goes fully commercial at $15 per user per month, and that is the important part, the licence attaches to the human user.
If an agent is working on behalf of that licensed user, it is covered under that user’s Agent 365 or Microsoft 365 E7 licence, so those agents do not need to be licensed separately.

Please contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our First Digital experts, Agent 365, to start seeing how these agents can start adding efficiencies to your business that you may never have thought possible!

Microsoft Dataverse capacity updates

Microsoft has updated the Dataverse storage entitlements for Dynamics 365 Sales Premium. The big changes arriving 15 April are more breathing room across the board, with default Dataverse Database capacity increasing from 30 GB to 45 GB, accrued Dataverse Database capacity per user licence doubling from 250 MB to 500 MB, and default Dataverse File capacity rising from 40 GB to 60 GB.
The March Licensing guide reflecting these changes is also available here.

Please contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our Architects to help ensure you are getting the maximing benefits from these increases before investing in more.

Azure SRE Agents announced

Microsoft has now released Azure SRE Agent into general availability. SRE stands for Site Reliability Engineering, so this is essentially an AI operations assistant aimed at helping reliability teams improve uptime, cut operational toil, and speed up diagnosis and response. 
From a licensing angle, it is worth watching because Azure SRE Agent does not use Copilot Credits like Copilot Studio agents do. Instead, it is billed in Azure Agent Units, or AAUs, which Microsoft uses as the consumption metric for these prebuilt Azure agents. That leaves customers with yet another unit to keep track of, which is why the Agent Pre-Purchase Plan matters more.

Please contact your First Technology Group account manager to connect you with our licensing and Azure specialists for clarification as it is going to be increasingly important to have a partner you can trust keeping an eye on these different consumption metrics.

Microsoft Dynamics Licensing guidance updated (again)

Microsoft has refreshed parts of its Dynamics 365 FAQ library, with updated guidance now covering AI capabilities in Dynamics 365, licensing for Customer Insights, and licensing and storage questions for Dynamics 365 Sales. There is also a Team Members FAQ on Microsoft Learn, though that page does not appear to have been updated as recently as the others.

FAQ Links are as follows:


• FAQs about AI capabilities in Dynamics 365.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights FAQs.
• Dynamics 365 Sales, Licenses and Storage FAQs.
• Dynamics 365 Team Members license overview and FAQ.
• Dynamics 365 Sales Troubleshooting and FAQs hub, which links to the broader Sales FAQ set, including Copilot and licensing topics

Please contact your First Technology Group account manager to connect you with our Dynamics licensing experts to review your Dynamics licensing, as it is being updated all the time along with increasing in complexity/

Security

Do you think you're pretty good at spotting Phishing emails? Think again.

In a recent study by Darktrace it was found that 4 out of 5 office workers were confident in spotting phishing attacks. However in real world simulations the picture is disturbingly different. Nowadays, with AI doing most of the writing, properly identifying a phishing email is more difficult, but not impossible.

Checking the sender’s domain, analysing links before clicking, and looking for telltale signs such as a sense of high urgency or threats are still solid techniques.

The process is no longer obvious, because the phishing email is expertly written by a very clever AI to mess with your mind and your human emotions, you need a different approach to dealing with these messages that requires a deeper understanding of the psychological aspects.
PLEASE contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our training specialists to help ensure your staff are educated in dealing with these messages in different ways that might not even be delivered by emails.

Phishing attacks can fool your AI

Helpful AI browsing assistants may be a lot more gullible than people think. Researchers highlighted a trick where attackers use custom fonts and CSS so the AI reads harmless text in the page code, while the user sees something completely different on screen. In the proof of concept, the page looked safe to the assistant, but the rendered version pushed the user towards harmful actions. The point is nasty and simple, an AI can "OK" a phishing page because it is reading the underlying DOM (Document Object Model), not judging what the human being actually sees.
Yet again, the human becomes the weakest link by trusting an AI that attackers are intentionally tricking, leading to YOU being tricked by dropping your guard! This again is a reminder of the new type of training that is needed to make sure your users are more alert than ever!

PLEASE contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our training specialists to help ensure everybody is kept up to date on how to handle these increasingly sophisticated attacks.

Cloud & AI

ARM to make its OWN CPU's

Arm has made its boldest move in decades by deciding to sell its own data-centre CPU, not just license the architecture to everyone else. That could open a big new revenue stream, with Meta already lined up as the first major customer, but it also puts Arm in direct competition with the very hyperscalers and chip makers that helped build its success. If those partners start feeling that Arm is no longer Switzerland and is now another rival in the rack, this could push more of them towards building around alternatives such as RISC-V. Big opportunity, yes, but also a very good way to annoy nearly every customer you have.