For any CISO, staying aligned with and closely following the main trends and challenges in the cybersecurity market is essential. In this article, we present iT.eam’s perspective for 2026, based on the challenges and discussions we experienced throughout the year.

Artificial Intelligence among security trends

It comes as no surprise that the major security trend for 2026 is Artificial Intelligence. This is because, in 2026, AI plays three roles at once: attacker, target, and defense.

With the long-standing shortage of security professionals, solutions increasingly rely on AI to expand analysts’ operational capacity. Today, AI supports investigation processes, detects access anomalies, summarizes incidents, and helps analysts create queries and reports—significantly reducing manual workload. At the same time, however, AI also enables the automation of attacks, the creation of deepfakes, phishing pages, and other attack techniques that increase speed and efficiency for adversaries.

Beyond enhancing both offensive and defensive capabilities, AI has also become a target. With the hype and productivity gains driven by AI, nearly all organizations are seeking ways to become more competitive through its adoption.

This often involves generating, cataloging, and centralizing access to sensitive data and organizational resources within AI agents. As a result, these agents are capable of causing significant damage and have become highly valuable targets for attackers. Protecting AI models, controlling how employees interact with them, and securing the access and data handled by these agents is one of the major challenges organizations will face in 2026.

Security Posture Management (SPM)

Given the level of attention AI is generating, it is increasingly important that security controls are properly implemented, as even a simple misconfiguration can now be identified and exploited much faster.

For this reason, solutions focused on posture verification and validation are becoming critical to environmental resilience. Today, many products include Security Posture Management (SPM) modules that help analysts identify best practices in service configurations. Examples include Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM), and Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), all of which play a key role in ensuring best practices and preventing incidents caused by simple configuration errors.

Zero Trust

The implementation of Zero Trust is not a new concept, but it remains a challenge for many organizations and will continue to be a priority beyond 2026. Zero Trust must go beyond network access and extend to applications, resources, and data within the organization.

Which resources should a user have access to within an application? Which data can they access? When using AI, what responses should an agent be allowed to provide to that user? And in application-to-application access, which data and resources can an application or agent access?

All these aspects must be considered to achieve a complete Zero Trust implementation—one that will become increasingly important in strengthening organizational resilience.

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

Another factor that will strongly influence security operations is the management of organizational exposure. For years, we have worked intensively on vulnerability management within our environments, and we are now evolving this effort into a risk-oriented approach that will not only continue, but gain even more relevance throughout the year.

CTEM and its disciplines—such as attack surface management, exposure validation, Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS), and Attack Path Analysis—are becoming increasingly important within security teams.

These are the key elements we consider essential for building a robust security strategy for 2026. However, beyond these trends, organizations must not lose sight of foundational security practices. Maintaining controls related to compliance, threat management, devices, access, and all disciplines that make up security frameworks remains critical.

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