Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Aron Brand, CTO, CTERA
For the past decade, the enterprise world operated on two comfortable assumptions: that the public cloud was endlessly resilient, and that readily available and rapidly improving AI chat tools like ChatGPT were a low-risk boost to productivity. In 2025, both ideas collided with reality. Highly visible cloud outages exposed how centralized and fragile core infrastructure had become, while widespread use of SaaS AI tools quietly created uncontrolled copies of innermost corporate knowledge. Together, these developments set the tone for 2026 as a year focused less on rapid adoption and more on regaining control over data, systems, and risk.
Here are three predictions for the year ahead.
1. The End of the Single Cloud of Failure
The fall of 2025 marked a turning point in how enterprises view the public cloud. A series of cascading failures across major cloud providers made one thing clear: despite claims of redundancy, individual providers remain vulnerable to human error, and concentrating critical workloads on a single platform creates systemic risk. When shared infrastructure fails and regions go dark, our reliance on an oligopoly of SaaS infrastructure and cloud providers means large parts of the digital economy can grind to a halt.
In 2026, the idea that an enterprise can rely on a single public cloud for any mission-critical workflows will finally fade. This is not a retreat from the cloud, but a shift toward more deliberate hybrid and multi-cloud designs. Organizations that take availability seriously will use data synchronization technologies to distribute stateful applications and data across on-premises environments, regional facilities, and multiple cloud providers. Much like aerospace systems built with triple redundancy to tolerate failure, infrastructure will be designed to survive inevitable faults rather than assume they will not happen. The goal is resilience through diversity, grounded in the internet’s original principle: assume failure and design systems that continue to operate anyway.
2. Shadow AI Becomes a Governance Problem
While cloud outages were loud and visible, another risk has been quietly building with far less scrutiny. Employees across every department have been feeding sensitive documents, internal discussions, and deeply candid thinking into poorly governed AI chat tools, often treating them as if they were private conversations. Each interaction creates fragments of corporate intelligence, including ideas that might never appear in formal documents, stored outside the organization’s control with unclear retention and usages policies.
In 2026, a series of leaked chat histories containing highly sensitive and embarrassing content will force enterprises to confront this reality. AI usage will be treated as a data governance issue, not just a productivity trend. The response will not be to ban AI tools, but to stop assuming that stateful SaaS chat services are private workspaces. Organizations will bring AI interactions back into governed environments, with clear controls over data residency, retention of chat histories, and guardrails defining what can and cannot be shared. AI will remain central to how work gets done, but it will increasingly operate within the same trust boundaries as other core enterprise systems.
3. The Archive Is Reborn as a Digital Ark
For years, the data archive was viewed primarily as a compliance necessity and a cost-reduction tool. That view is rapidly changing. Enterprises are realizing that unchecked data growth not only drives cost, but also continuously expands the attack surface. At the same time, historical data, from operational logs to machine telemetry, is becoming essential as organizations grow more data-driven and look to build future AI and analytics capabilities.
In 2026, the archive will be reimagined as a strategic asset built on immutability. By securing data in write-once containers that cannot be altered or encrypted by attackers, organizations establish a last line of defense against ransomware and data corruption. This immutable archive becomes a trusted record of business operations. Increasingly, it will be treated as a Digital Ark: a protected store of truth that preserves institutional memory, supports advanced analytics, and ensures recovery even when everything else fails.
In 2026, the mandate is clear: we must build a sturdier, more self-sufficient digital foundation. The future belongs to those who spread resilience across every layer, tame their AI data, and reclaim absolute control over their digital destiny.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aron Brand, CTO of CTERA Networks, has more than 22 years of experience in designing and implementing distributed software systems. Prior to joining the founding team of CTERA, Aron acted as Chief Architect of SofaWare Technologies, a Check Point company, where he led the design of security software and appliances for the service provider and enterprise markets. Previously, Aron developed software at IDF�s Elite Technology Unit 8200. He holds a BSc degree in computer science and business administration from Tel-Aviv University.
