Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Murat Balaban, CEO and Asha Kalyur, VP of Marketing, Zenarmor
Governments are responding to real risks such as ransomware, AI misuse, and child protection but the pendulum often swings toward control over coherence. Regulating ransom payments or encryption backdoors may look like safety measures, yet they also weaken privacy and trust. What is missing is global coordination.
Without common standards, well-intentioned laws will create more fragmentation than protection. The next evolution should focus on globally harmonized digital safety frameworks. The real challenge lies in balancing sovereignty with shared digital norms.
We will take a look at the areas that we believe will resonate with CISOs in 2026 below.
Regulations and International Operations
Global enterprises now face compliance gridlock. Every region redefines data sovereignty, encryption, and AI accountability differently. The result is duplicated audits, fragmented controls, and rising costs. Forward-looking teams are embracing “compliance-as-code.” Organizations will need compliance designed into the architecture, automated where possible, adaptive by design, and consistent across regions. It is how we unify security and compliance without slowing innovation.
Access to The Internet – Who Owns the Right?
Access to the internet is quietly shifting from an open right to a curated reality, filtered by governments, corporations, and algorithms deciding what we see and who gets heard. Safety and governance have their place, but the deeper risk is the quiet erosion of digital freedom under the banner of protection. When access becomes conditional, innovation and knowledge fracture along sovereign and algorithmic lines. To remain a true human right, digital access must stay open by design, not granted at the discretion of power.
Managing Regulation Compliance is Complicated
Today’s compliance playbook is no longer about checking boxes, it is about engineering trust. Leading companies align to the toughest standards, embed privacy and security into design, and extend Zero Trust principles across their architecture. But the storm is only building. AI, privacy, and cybersecurity mandates are colliding, creating a new era of regulatory complexity, one where even algorithms must explain themselves. The advantage will belong to those who turn compliance into a living system: continuous, adaptive, and coded into the fabric of their architecture.
Is zero trust an aim for most companies? Will we ever get there?
Zero Trust has become the industry’s north star but most organizations are still mapping the route, not living it. The reality is incremental: Identity and access have evolved quickly, but true Zero Trust demands the same agility deep in the network and data where most organizations still struggle. The real breakthrough is extending Zero Trust enforcement from users to the network itself ensuring every connection, session, and packet is verified in real time. In addition, architectures that enforce policy and inspection directly where connections are established have shown deployment performance improvements ranging from 50� to as high as 1500� compared to models based solely on cloud-delivered security inspection. There are platforms that make it possible today. Achieving 100% Zero Trust may be an ongoing journey. But the foundation is already here, verification built directly into how networks connect and security operates, every time, everywhere.
The perimeter is dead, it’s time to accept it
Many security architectures still cling to the illusion of a fixed perimeter because it is simpler to manage and explain. As hybrid, remote, and edge environments expand, organizations have to shift to a “trust fabric” mindset, protection that travels with users and applications, not networks. Platforms built on a single-app, single-stack model, already enable this shift by enforcing policy and inspection directly at the source. The catalyst will be user experience: once teams see that Zero Trust can deliver faster, frictionless connectivity compared to legacy VPNs and static controls, adoption will accelerate.
It’s time for 100% Zero Trust
Legacy infrastructure resists segmentation, budgets favor visibility tools over architecture redesign, and users resist anything that slows them down. That is beginning to shift as regulatory pressure, risk, and accountability converge pushing organizations toward Zero Trust by default. As regulatory and risk pressures intensify, Zero Trust adoption will no longer be optional. The next generation of security architectures will abstract away that complexity, embedding Zero Trust directly into infrastructure so teams don’t need to rebuild from scratch.
Partial Zero Trust is Out
Partial Zero Trust is infinitely better than none if it is intentional. The danger isn’t being incomplete, it is being inconsistent. Too many organizations stop at MFA or SSO and mistake access control for Zero Trust. Real progress means layering continuous verification across identities, devices, and applications, creating momentum toward adaptive, always-on trust rather than static defense.
Identity is the core of Zero Trust
Without validated identity, context, and behavior, “never trust, always verify” collapses. AI makes this harder and easier all at once, harder because synthetic identities and deepfakes distort signals, and easier because AI-driven analytics can detect behavioral anomalies faster than humans ever could. Success depends on merging human oversight with machine precision: AI verifying identity, and humans verifying AI’s logic.
Friction-free MFA in 2026
We are on the edge of friction-free MFA. Passwords are disappearing, biometrics are blending in, and adaptive MFA is quietly getting smarter. The next frontier is invisible MFA, trust that just happens. Your device, location, and behavior become your key. You won’t “log in”, you will simply exist in a continuously verified state. Security won’t feel like a checkpoint anymore, it will feel like air: always there, always working, completely effortless. That is where Zero Trust transcends security: secure by design, invisible by default.
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