Navigating 2026: the Top 5 IT Priorities for Enterprise Resilience
As we look ahead to 2026, enterprise IT leaders are facing a complex landscape of evolving threats, shifting regulations, and persistent budget constraints. Recent data from a survey of 284 enterprises reveals a clear set of priorities emerging to address these challenges. These aren’t simply about adopting the latest tech; they’re about building a more resilient, manageable, and governed IT foundation. Hear’s a breakdown of the top 5 priorities, and what they mean for your organization.
1. Cybersecurity posture Enhancement (Implied – sets the stage)
While not explicitly numbered in the original data, a strong undercurrent throughout all reported priorities is a heightened focus on cybersecurity. The increasing sophistication of attacks, coupled with the expanding attack surface created by cloud adoption, necessitates a proactive and robust security posture. This foundational concern informs and influences all subsequent priorities.
2. Cloud Backup & Disaster Recovery: Beyond Outages
Coming in as the second highest priority for 173 out of 284 enterprises, robust cloud backup strategies are no longer optional. recent, high-profile cloud outages have underscored a critical vulnerability. Though, the challenge is far more nuanced than simply replicating data.
IT planners recognize that complete immunity from major cloud disruptions is unrealistic. Most outages are resolved within hours, allowing some applications to weather the storm. The key lies in strategic prioritization: what truly needs backing up, and how?
Enterprises are weighing options like multi-cloud deployments against expanding on-premise capacity. Crucially, achieving true resilience often requires application redesign – making cloud-hosted elements portable and carefully considering data storage and access methods. This isn’t just a technical fix; it’s a strategic shift in application architecture.
3. Infrastructure Simplification: Less is More
Complexity is the enemy of efficiency. 139 enterprises cited managing the sheer volume of “things” – technologies, vendors, and sources – as a major pain point.A full-scale infrastructure overhaul is frequently enough financially impossible,but a long-term simplification strategy is gaining traction.
Interestingly, there’s a growing acceptance of vendor “lock-in” as a worthwhile trade-off for reduced operational complexity, streamlined integration, and easier fault isolation. This represents a significant departure from the prevailing multi-vendor and open infrastructure approaches of recent years. The focus is shifting from choice to manageability.
4. Governance Revamp: Navigating a Regulatory Maze
Governance is moving beyond project-level checklists and becoming a continuous, proactive function.124 enterprises identified a need to “totally revamp governance,” driven by factors like the rise of AI, the elastic nature of cloud, data sovereignty concerns, and an increasingly complex regulatory landscape.
The percentage of companies seeking “government affairs” input into IT management has skyrocketed from 12% in 2020 to 47% projected for 2026. EU cloud and AI sovereignty regulations are a prime example, impacting both application resilience and AI deployment strategies.
the biggest hurdle? Governance has historically been reactive, tied to specific projects. Now, organizations need to address governance implications arising from everyday application usage and data access – especially with AI, where understanding what data is being accessed can be incredibly challenging. This begs the question: are “governance projects” necessary, and how can they be justified and funded?
5.Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): beyond Capital Expenditure
108 enterprises are prioritizing cost management. However, the focus is evolving. Unlike previous years where cost management centered on capital expenditure, the emphasis for 2026 is on *Total Cost of Ownership (T
