Security Priorities 2026
Secure IT’s moment for uncertain times.
The Situation
Security leaders head into 2026 with the ground constantly shifting beneath them. They’re grappling with advanced AI threats, a volatile global economy, geopolitical tension, and regulatory compliance changes. To navigate this unpredictability, they must foster a resilience mindset across the entire organization. Security must go above and beyond responding to threats. Now, it’s all about supporting secure innovation, even as IT budgets and spending face rising scrutiny in the year to come.
This report reveals critical findings based on data from the Info-Tech Future of IT 2026 survey plus insightful interviews with 20 security matter experts. It outlines five key priorities to reassess and realign enterprise security in 2026.
1. Strengthen Data Resilience
Protect data against evolving ransomware and AI threats.
AI has armed cyber criminals with a whole new arsenal of powerful weapons. Boost your defenses with a mitigation plan that’s both proactive and adaptive. Build a robust data security program to enhance data governance and develop a resilient response plan to improve business continuity.
2. Enable Scalable Compliance
Manage diverging regulations across geographies.
Data privacy and security regulations are emerging across the globe far too quickly for manual monitoring efforts to keep up. Develop continuous compliance monitoring, leverage automation, and scale your compliance strategy to ensure it meets changing global standards.
3. Reduce Vendor Sprawl
Optimize converging security tool portfolio.
With a challenging economy putting IT budgets under pressure, the opportunity to streamline costs by tackling tool bloat is being prioritized. Discard tools with overlapping capabilities or little organizational value. Focus on interoperability and look for ways to optimize ROI through AI, automation, and integrated security platforms.
4. Minimize Implicit Trust.
Anchor zero trust architecture to identities.
Adoption of zero trust security has been thwarted by legacy systems, whose implicit trust model fails to re-verify users or devices after initial login. But don’t let your zero trust efforts fail. Build a core security framework around strong identity management practice. Harness the capabilities of AI and automation to streamline your zero trust efforts and continuously monitor machine identities.
5. Drive Secure Innovation
Transform application security for the agentic AI era.
While agentic AI is turbocharging coding and application development, it’s also introducing new risks that traditional security practices aren’t designed to handle. It’s time to enhance DevSecOps and SDLC initiatives for this new generation of AI-driven development. Give automation a starring role here – but balance it with strategic human oversight.
Blueprint Contents
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Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
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