Over the past year, I’ve met with customers and partners across every major industry, from healthcare and public sector to manufacturing and finance. No matter the vertical, the pattern is the same: The path to real AI value runs straight through your data infrastructure.

Not through the biggest model. Not through a new cloud directive. But through the quality, governance and accessibility of the data beneath it all.

That’s why 2026 is shaping up to be a defining year, not just for AI, but for intelligent data infrastructure. It’s changing the way organizations activate data, secure it and scale it across hybrid multicloud environments.

Here are four shifts every enterprise should be preparing for.

AI Moves From ‘Trying’ to ‘Scaling,’ if the Data Is Ready

Most enterprises are not held back by model performance; they’reheld back by data readiness. In 2026, three AI trends will accelerate at the same time:

• AI moves beyond pilots to production. The differentiator won’t be dataset size but whether data is unified, governed and accessible across environments.
• Agentic AI becomes real. These systems rely on fast, trusted access to enterprise data, no matter where it lives.
• AI happens wherever the data is. Unified hybrid multicloud data lets organizations run AI on any hyperscaler, without moving massive datasets or breaking compliance.

The companies that succeed won’t just build AI; they’ll build the data foundation that makes AI reliable, secure and scalable.

Cloud Strategy Is Workload-Led and Intelligence-Driven

The old cloud debates (cloud-first, cloud-only) are fading. In 2026, cloud strategy becomes what the workload needs, not where leadership wants it to run. That means:

• Workloads land where they deliver the best outcomes: performance, governance and efficiency.
• Data sovereignty becomes a non-negotiable requirement as regulations tighten.
• Cloud value is measured less by cost savings and more by return on intelligence, or how well cloud environments generate insights and impact.

(And one more shift that often goes understated: Partners will play a bigger role in hybrid cloud decisions. From sovereign architectures to multicloud data design, partners are becoming essential advisors in helping enterprises navigate complexity and modernize faster.)

Cyber Resilience Becomes Real-Time and Integrity-Led

Security teams are dealing with a different world now: multistep breaches, AI-driven threat automation and data moving across more personas and automated agents than ever. In 2026, enterprises will focus on:

• Rapid breach detection and clean recovery as the new resilience benchmark.
• Broad adoption of AI-native detection and forensics, especially as AI systems protect other AI systems.
• Data integrity as a core requirement, not an add-on.

The last point matters most: Data integrity becomes essential for trustworthy AI. As content grows and AI touches more critical data, organizations must be able to prove that data is accurate, unaltered and safe to use. Cyber resilience isn’t just IT risk management anymore. It’s business continuity, customer trust and competitive credibility.

Modernization Means Speed to Shift, Not Spend to Build

Modernization used to mean forklifts, big refresh cycles and large capital plans. In 2026, it means something very different:

• Disaggregation becomes common practice. Organizations scale performance and capacity independently to meet AI and analytics needs, without overprovisioning.
• Intelligent no-copy migrations accelerate modernization. Migration toolkits reduce cost and time, enabling faster shifts between environments.
• Enterprises adopt unified, single-namespace access to data. Data sets are simply too large for a single environment. Companies need seamless access across on-premises and multicloud without disruption.

Modernization is no longer measured by how much you build, but by how quickly you shift and scale.

What This Means for Business Leaders

Whether your priority is revenue, efficiency, innovation or customer experience, these shifts signal a shared truth: Intelligent data infrastructure is becoming the new enterprise differentiator. Not because it’s a new marketing term, but because it’s the only way to operationalize at scale, defend against evolving threats, comply with shifting regulatory demands and modernize data estates fast enough to keep up with data growth.

If AI is the engine, the data infrastructure is the operating system. It determines how fast the business can go — and how far.

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