As we head into 2026, the technology and cybersecurity landscape is facing a perfect storm of challenges. We gathered predictions from five industry experts who are seeing dramatic shifts that will reshape how enterprises approach security, infrastructure, and AI deployment.
High Availability as Cybersecurity Strategy
Margaret Hoagland, VP of Global Sales & Marketing at SIOS Technology, sees IT professionals increasingly turning to high availability software as a core component of cybersecurity planning. Solutions like SIOS LifeKeeper and DataKeeper enable organizations to test upgrades and patches in real-world settings and deploy them with near-zero downtime-critical capabilities for effective patch management and security posture.
The Economic Reality of AI Hits Home
Rob Hirschfeld, CEO of RackN, cuts through the AI hype with a stark warning: the subsidized pilot phase is ending. In 2026, production AI workloads will force CFOs to confront real token costs, driving many enterprises back to bare metal infrastructure for economic reasons-not innovation. The problem? A decade of cloud-first strategies has killed bare metal expertise, leaving companies facing failed deployments and million-dollar GPU clusters sitting idle. Hirschfeld also highlights the convergence of AI and virtualization challenges, with Kubernetes emerging as the common control platform across different teams tackling VMs and AI workloads.
AI vs. AI: The New Cybersecurity Arms Race
Tom Findling, Co-founder & CEO of Conifers, predicts a fundamental shift: adversaries are already deploying agentic AI to scale attacks and bypass threshold-based controls. The response? Organizations will have no choice but to adopt AI defensive capabilities, leading to “agents fighting agents and AI fighting AI.” Companies that don’t embrace this technology risk being left behind as lateral movement attacks become more sophisticated and large-scale.
The Governance Gap and Threat Actor Democratization
Andy Syrewicze, Security Evangelist at Hornetsecurity, identifies a critical problem: IT departments and shadow users are adopting AI faster than security teams can implement governance. Meanwhile, agentic AI is lowering the barrier to entry for threat actors, eliminating the need for deep technical expertise to launch attacks. His solution? Expect phishing-resistant MFA methods like FIDO2 passkeys to become mandatory as adversary-in-the-middle attacks using tools like EvilGinx continue to siphon credentials and tokens.
Obfuscation Techniques Evolve
Alastair Parr, CTO of Spur Intelligence, focuses on how threat actors mask intent through VPNs and residential proxies. He predicts organizations will proactively block agentic AI traffic, invest in detecting residential proxy abuse (increasingly commercialized through IoT devices and media apps), and face growing challenges from geographic obfuscation as users become savvier with VPN usage. The key shift? Security teams will finally have access to sophisticated enough data to implement “friction-centric workflows” that balance security with user experience.
The Bottom Line
2026 isn’t just another year of incremental change. It’s when the bills come due-literally for AI economics and figuratively for years of deprioritized infrastructure expertise. The experts agree: organizations that fail to rebuild operational muscle, embrace AI-powered defenses, and implement sophisticated detection capabilities will struggle to remain competitive and secure.
The question isn’t whether these changes are coming-it’s whether your organization is prepared to lead or be left behind.
