Security at the Speed of Change: What Leaders Must Prioritize in 2026
As security threats accelerate, leaders heading into 2026 must rethink their approach by recognizing identity as a significant attack surface, using AI responsibly, and shifting from reactive reporting to proactive prevention.
The common thread in every security conversation I'm having lately? Speed. Everything is moving faster. The threats facing our industry are evolving rapidly, and every company has their eye on how we can respond more quickly and stay ahead of an unquestionably challenging landscape. As we head into 2026, there are three things every security leader should be thinking about:
Identity is your biggest attack surface
Identity abuse is behind nearly every major breach. We’re not just talking about employee passwords anymore. It’s human identities, service accounts, cloud integrations, and now AI systems generating their own credentials and tokens. The reality? Most organizations have a tangled web of access permissions that no team can map manually.
The proactive move is to implement AI-powered tools that continuously monitor who has access to what, automatically enforce "least privilege" (giving people only the access they need), and watch for suspicious behavior like unusual login patterns or unauthorized permission changes.
AI is a double-edged sword, use it wisely
The uncomfortable truth: AI is supercharging both attackers and defenders. The threats are turbocharged because AI is lowering the barrier to entry. AI coding tools are potentially trained on undiscovered vulnerabilities for rapid proofs of concept, agentic browsers are creating new attack vectors, and attackers are using LLMs to execute complex attacks. At the same time, AI is dissolving traditional data boundaries.
The answer isn't to slow down AI adoption. It's to counter malicious intent with cutting-edge innovation. That means deploying AI-powered security and identity verification tools, network-level guardrails, and embedding security into products from day one.
Stop counting, start preventing
The old model of counting vulnerabilities and checking compliance boxes can't keep up. The industry is shifting from reactive reporting to proactive prevention. Focus on what attackers can actually exploit, not just vulnerability counts. Build security controls directly into your code and workflows so problems are solved before they ever reach production. Get unified visibility across all your cloud applications, not siloed reports.
The organizations that will thrive in 2026 are the ones turning reactive manual security actions into proactive automated workflows, powered by AI.
What are you prioritizing in 2026?
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