- Centralized cloud management, with secure access service edge (SASE) solutions dominating the field
- Proactive risk management takes over from reactive measures
- Zero trust is becoming a non-negotiable table stake
- Intelligent, agentic AI tools are becoming crucial for attack surface protection
- Sharp focus on third-party and supply chain risk
1. Cloud management will be centralized
No one would claim that cloud assets have gone completely unmanaged up until now, but that management has been disparate and diffused. As more and more sensitive data and operations move to the cloud, the stakes are rising. Cloud protection has never been more crucial.
What’s more, the rise in remote and hybrid work, with employees bringing their own devices (BYOD) and logging onto cloud systems through unsecured or poorly secured networks, requires stronger cloud defenses. This calls for the adoption of approaches like SD-WAN networking, firewall-as-a-service, secure web gateways, cloud access security brokers for visibility and control over cloud data and powerful data loss protection plans, alongside traditional protections like identity and access management, zero trust and enterprise policy enforcement.
With so many moving parts, we predict a steep rise in the adoption of solutions that incorporate these multifaceted defenses. Today’s advanced SASE technologies seamlessly unify all the above methods to reduce complexity and improve agility by centralizing it all into one view, which will drive SASE to dominance in 2026.
