Your security strategy is solving last year's problem.
That's not a criticism. It's structural. Security has always been reactive by nature. Vulnerabilities get discovered, patches get released, controls get implemented. Threats evolve, defenses adapt. The cycle continues.
But 2026 is different. Three forces are converging that make reactive security insufficient: quantum computing moving from theoretical to imminent, AI making both attacks and defenses faster, and operational complexity creating blind spots that traditional security tools can't see.
The enterprises that still think about security as "patch vulnerabilities and monitor for threats" are going to discover that model no longer protects what actually matters. Not because the fundamentals changed. But because the attack surface, the threat velocity, and the consequences of failure all shifted at once.
We asked four e360 experts who secure enterprise environments, build operational resilience, and prepare organizations for emerging threats what they're seeing. Their predictions aren't about which security product to buy. They're about which strategic shifts you can't afford to ignore.
From Vulnerabilities to Exposure: The Shift That Changes Everything
Andy Bernard, VP of Strategic Accounts at e360, sees the most fundamental strategic shift happening in how organizations think about security: "We're seeing a shift from Vulnerability Management to Exposure Management."
This sounds subtle. It's not.
Vulnerability management asks: "What are all the CVEs in our environment, and which ones should we patch first?" It's a game of whack-a-mole where you're constantly chasing the newest critical vulnerability, applying patches, rescanning, and repeating.
Exposure management asks a different question: "Given our specific environment, data, and business operations, which attack paths could actually cause material damage, and how do we close those paths?"
The difference is strategic. Vulnerability management treats every CVE as potentially equal and uses CVSS scores to prioritize. Exposure management recognizes that a critical-severity vulnerability in a system that has no access to sensitive data and sits behind three network boundaries is less dangerous than a medium-severity vulnerability in a system that can reach your customer database.
Bernard explains the practical implication: "Data Strategy for AI readiness requires DSPM and DLP integration to improve data readiness and protection while implementing AI." This isn't about buying more security tools. It's about understanding where your sensitive data lives, which systems can access it, and which potential breaches would actually matter.
The organizations still operating purely on vulnerability management in 2026 will waste resources patching systems that don't materially reduce risk while missing the attack paths that do.
The Invisible Threat: Quantum Decryption Isn't Tomorrow Anymore
Bernard also sees the timeline on quantum threats compressing: "Quantum encryption solutions to prepare for the 'Harvest Now, Decrypt Later' threat, where adversaries, likely nation-states, are currently collecting vast amounts of heavily encrypted data, anticipating that a future cryptographically relevant quantum computer will allow them to decrypt it years or decades from now."
Let's break down why this matters now, not in some distant future.
The threat model: Adversaries don't need quantum computers today. They just need storage. They're collecting encrypted data right now—encrypted communications, encrypted backups, encrypted databases that they've exfiltrated. They can't read it today. But they're betting that quantum computers capable of breaking current encryption will exist within the next decade.
What that means for you: Any sensitive data you're encrypting today with current standards could be readable in 5-10 years. If that data has long-term value—intellectual property, customer records, financial information, healthcare data—then encrypting it with today's standards isn't protecting it. You're just delaying when it becomes readable.
The urgency: Transitioning to post-quantum cryptography isn't a weekend project. It requires inventory of every system using encryption, evaluation of which algorithms are quantum-resistant, testing to ensure new encryption doesn't break existing systems, and phased migration across your entire environment.
Organizations that start this process in 2026 might complete it before quantum computers become cryptographically relevant. Organizations that wait until quantum computers are announced will be starting the migration after their encrypted data is already vulnerable.
The question isn't "when will quantum computers exist?" The question is "how long do I need my currently encrypted data to remain secret?" If the answer is more than five years, you need to start the transition now.
When AI Confidence Exceeds AI Competence
Roy Douber, Senior DevOps Architect at e360, sees a specific security risk emerging from AI adoption: "AI-driven overconfidence in changes: teams implementing AI-suggested configs and scripts without deep validation, leading to misconfigurations, insecure defaults, and avoidable outages."
This is the security risk nobody's talking about. Not because AI is malicious. Because AI is convincing.
When an AI tool suggests a configuration change, it provides context. It explains its reasoning. It references documentation. It sounds confident. And for teams under pressure to move fast, that confidence is persuasive.
The problem? AI tools are trained on patterns from thousands of environments, but they don't know your specific environment. They don't know that your network segmentation has a particular quirk. They don't know that your monitoring system has a blind spot. They don't know that the "best practice" configuration they're suggesting will create an unintended exposure in your specific context.
Douber emphasizes what organizations need: "Guardrails, review patterns, and safer automation." Not less automation. Not abandoning AI-suggested changes. But treating AI suggestions as first drafts that require expert review, not final configurations ready for production.
The security implication is clear: AI-suggested configurations that bypass review processes create attack surface. The gap between "this looks right" and "this is secure in our specific environment" is where breaches happen.
Operational Accountability: The Security Layer You're Missing
Isaac Nickell, VP of Managed Services at e360, sees security risk hiding in organizational structure: "Accountability is fragmented across tools, teams, and vendors."
This is the operational reality of modern security. You have a SIEM tool from one vendor, EDR from another, cloud security posture management from a third, network monitoring from a fourth. You have internal security teams, managed security service providers, infrastructure teams, application teams. Everyone has visibility into their piece. Nobody has visibility into the whole.
When an incident happens, the question "who's responsible for detecting and responding to this?" often doesn't have a clear answer. Was it the SIEM team's responsibility because it should have generated an alert? Was it the infrastructure team's responsibility because it was a misconfiguration? Was it the MSSP's responsibility because they monitor the environment?
Nickell's point is strategic: "We act as the operational owner, using SIAM-aligned governance to coordinate providers, manage escalations, and deliver clear service accountability." Security isn't just about having the right tools and the right policies. It's about having clear operational ownership when something goes wrong.
The organizations that succeed in 2026 will be the ones who can answer "who owns security outcomes?" with a name and a phone number, not a list of vendors and internal teams.
Observability as Security
Troy Couch, Director of Digital Workplace at e360, sees observability becoming a security requirement: "User experience quality becomes a standard KPI for businesses to track, which will lead to increased requirements for observability from the end-user to the datacenter or cloud."
This might not sound like a security prediction. It is.
Security monitoring has traditionally focused on infrastructure: firewalls, network traffic, server logs, authentication systems. But increasingly, attacks manifest as user experience degradation before they manifest as security alerts.
A ransomware attack often shows up as application slowness before it shows up as encrypted files. A credential compromise often shows up as unusual access patterns before it shows up as data exfiltration. A DDoS attack shows up as performance degradation before it shows up as complete service unavailability.
Organizations with end-to-end observability that tracks user experience as a KPI can detect security incidents earlier because they see the operational impact before the security impact becomes obvious.
Couch's prediction about cloud PCs becoming default also has security implications: "Cloud-based PC solutions like AVD, Windows 365, and Workspaces become the default, not the exception." When the endpoint itself is cloud-based, traditional endpoint security models don't apply. Security needs to be embedded into the observability layer, not bolted on afterward.
What This Means for Your 2026 Security Strategy
The through-line across all these predictions is clear: security is moving from tool-centric to strategy-centric, from reactive to anticipatory, and from technical to operational.
Shift from vulnerability management to exposure management. Not every vulnerability matters equally. Prioritize based on actual attack paths in your specific environment.
Start the quantum readiness transition now. If your encrypted data needs to stay secret beyond 2030, current encryption isn't sufficient. Post-quantum cryptography migration takes years.
Treat AI-suggested changes as recommendations, not production-ready configurations. Maintain expert review processes. AI confidence doesn't equal AI correctness in your environment.
Clarify operational accountability. Who actually owns security outcomes? If the answer involves more than one sentence, you have a problem.
Embed security into observability. User experience degradation is often the earliest indicator of security incidents. Monitor it accordingly.
The vendors will sell you tools. The frameworks will give you checklists. But the organizations that build resilient security in 2026 will be the ones who recognize that security is an operational discipline, not a technology purchase.
Ready to Build Resilient Security Operations?
If your organization is navigating exposure management, planning post-quantum readiness, or building operational accountability into security operations, e360 can help.
