Industry predictions for 2026: It’s the new year soon, so what new ideas should organisations be adopting?

As boards face heightened accountability for incident oversight, they will increasingly demand proof, not promises. Tabletop exercises will give CISOs a direct forum to showcase their influence by aligning business leaders, clarifying roles under stress, revealing hidden dependencies and demonstrating readiness in measurable ways. They also help translate technical risk into business language, strengthening the CISO’s position at the executive table.

In 2026, CISOs who run frequent, cross-functional tabletop simulations will be seen as proactive risk leaders. Those who cannot facilitate these exercises or use their outcomes to inform strategy will struggle to justify budgets, influence board decisions and secure their seat in enterprise leadership.

Rob Dooley
General Manager, APJ, at Rapid7

In 2026, the speed and nature of consolidation in cyber security will redefine how organisations approach their security strategies. True consolidation will not mean relying solely on a single vendor or platform but will centre around adopting open platforms capable of ingesting telemetry from diverse, best-of-breed tools. These platforms will unify and contextualise data, enabling security teams to make faster, smarter decisions. Context will emerge as the new currency of cyber performance. As threat actors increasingly leverage AI to scale attacks, defenders will require more than just alerts – they will need clarity.

The integration of exposure management into detection workflows will become the gold standard, empowering defenders with faster triage, smarter responses and measurable impact. Organisations will align SecOps and executive stakeholders through shared dashboards and context-rich incident briefings, focusing on readiness, identifying gaps and demonstrating the value of security investments. Rationalising the security stack around high-impact tools that enhance time to detect, time to respond and analyst efficiency will be critical. Metrics such as time saved, dwell time reduced, risks remediated, and workflows accelerated will become the benchmarks for success.

In this new era, consolidation and context will go hand in hand, enabling organisations to not only defend against evolving threats but also to demonstrate the tangible value of their cyber security efforts.

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Nick Schneider
President and CEO of Arctic Wolf

In 2026, AI will be the catalyst for sweeping market consolidation. The past few years of fragmented, single-purpose cyber security tools have given way to unified platforms built around shared data, automation and embedded intelligence. As AI capabilities mature, these one-off features will increasingly be absorbed into broader ecosystems – and the companies that can integrate, not just acquire, will win. The market is moving from best of breed to best integrated, with scale, telemetry and workflow interoperability defining the next generation of security leaders.

At the same time, buyers are shifting from evaluating technology on feature lists to measuring it by outcomes. They care less about the number of tools deployed and more about how fast they can contain and recover from attacks. Security operations is becoming the standard category label for how organisations manage risk – where success is defined by speed, visibility and resilience. As capital markets normalise, investors will reward the operators who can prove AI-driven efficiency and measurable risk reduction, rather than those who only market it.

Uros Zajc
Red Hat Practice Lead at Atturra

One infrastructure-adjacent area we expect automation to really make its mark in 2026 is to improve the mean time to recovery for organisations that experience cyber incidents. Malware infections such as ransomware continue to cause problems for organisations, including in Australia. Recovery of production systems is still often a painful process, taking weeks or months, and many victims ultimately end up restoring from back-up on clean or new infrastructure. The more these recovery procedures can be automated, the more organisations can speed up recovery and resume normal operations.

We also predict a greater degree of automated checking of the back-ups themselves before attempting restores. According to research, 94 per cent of organisations hit by ransomware saw the threat actors attempt to compromise their back-ups during the attack as well, further reducing the victims’ options. We expect to see greater use of automated process tools around back-up processes, checking whether a back-up is infected or has potential security ramifications before it can be picked up and used in a restoration process.

As a result, we anticipate automation really driving a material improvement in the ability of organisations to recover safely and more quickly from cyber incidents in the coming year.