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How AI is Transforming Enterprise Security by 2026, ETCISO
Cybersecurity in 2026 transcends IT silos to become a core business enabler, demanding phygital resilience amid AI-augmented threats, stringent data sovereignty mandates, and geopolitical flux. Cyber threats continue to evolve and are faster, smarter, and more deceptive than ever before. AI is a focal point in both defense and attack. Deepfakes and agentic AI are creating a crisis of trust; attackers are using AI to mimic executives, clone voices, and operate social engineering schemes on a large scale. Additionally, with tightening data laws, organizations are grappling with striking the right balance between compliance, sovereignty, and resilience without sacrificing innovation or business continuity.
AI-Driven Security Operations: Redefining the Frontlines
Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are moving from signature-based and rule-based detection models toward autonomous security operations. GenAI-empowered SOCs can triage alerts, correlate signals across cloud and network, and recommend response actions, reducing analyst fatigue and shrinking MTTR by up to 60%. According to IDC, AI systems will process as much as 80% of first-level security warnings by 2028, enabling security teams to focus on high-value decision-making.
But this acceleration brings new challenges where explainability and human oversight remain key. Responsible, transparent AI builds the trust and resilience needed to stay ahead in this new era of intelligent cyber warfare. Enterprises must prioritize agility, visibility, and continuous learning. That means using AI not in silos, but across the entire digital fabric, from cloud to network to endpoint. Herein, ethics, clear model management and privacy when creating security programs are all rising in importance.
Fortitude in the Age of Uncertainty: Geopolitical and Regulatory Drivers
Sovereignty laws are tightening across the world from the EU’s Data Act and China’s PIPL to the U.S. CLOUD Act and Australia’s localization rules. India’s own DPDP Act, governs how personal data is collected, processed, and stored within national borders. These regulations define where data can live, who can access it, and which laws apply.
As global restrictions can abruptly put a sudden stop to certain technologies, companies must persevere to keep things moving. Today, firms evaluate technology with emphasis on how things can be adapted to handle jurisdiction rules. Aligning security practices with global standards is no longer optional, but essential for maintaining a competitive advantage.
With India emerging as one of the world’s fastest-growing cybersecurity markets, regulatory compliance is becoming a baseline expectation. Yet mid-tier companies, often outside the top 10 metros, continue to face increasing attacks, requiring localized, compliance-aligned, AI-native security strategies that can scale with business growth. Cyber resilience is therefore not just defensive, it directly enables the ambition of India’s digital economy, where trust becomes a competitive differentiator.
API and Edge Security: Guarding New Gateways
APIs have become the backbone of modern digital ecosystems, enabling everything from customer transactions and partner integrations to multi-cloud orchestration. But their ubiquity also makes them a high-value attack vector. Recent industry data shows a sharp escalation in API-focused threats. This API threat report for 2025 reveals that 99% of organizations reported API security incidents, driven by injection attacks, BOLA vulnerabilities, and sensitive data exposure affecting 34% of cases, predominantly via authenticated external API sessions. These threats underscore attackers’ shift toward exploiting API logic, with governance gaps leaving most endpoints unmonitored.
Enterprises must strengthen API security governance through; continuous API discovery and cataloging, authentication hardening, runtime protection against injection and logic abuse, bot mitigation and adaptive rate-limiting and threat-aware traffic profiling at the edge.
Identity, Zero Trust and the New Perimeter
With hybrid work, distributed cloud, IoT, and 5G expanding attack surfaces, identity has become the de-facto perimeter. Zero Trust built on “never trust, always verify”, remains the most effective framework to secure high-velocity, hyper-connected environments.
A mature Zero Trust program goes far beyond perimeter controls and relies on continuous authentication and authorization, risk-adaptive access decisions, context-aware privilege elevation, automated device-posture checks, and strict lateral-movement containment. In this model, privilege decisions are dynamic, behavior-driven, and continuously evaluated rather than static or role-based, an essential requirement for API-first architectures, OT-connected factories, and distributed multi-cloud environments where conventional network boundaries no longer apply.
Responsible Data Practices: Governing for Trust
As data volumes grow and regulations tighten, enterprises must adopt unified, lifecycle-oriented data-protection strategies. These include encryption, key management, asset classification, anonymization, audit logs, and consent governance aligned to DPDP.
The Road Ahead: From Reaction to Prediction
The cyber security paradigm has now turned, and the focus has shifted to predicting what can happen before problems strike. That requires reframing cybersecurity from a technical safeguard to a leadership mandate for resilience. The organizations that will thrive are those that maintain clear visibility, respond intelligently, and embed trust at the center of their business models. This is something well beyond standard checkboxes, making robust security mandates a strategic advantage to enable business continuity, compliance, and confidence, even as threats increase.
The author is Vaibhav Dutta, Vice President and Global Head-Cybersecurity Products & Services at Tata Communications.
Disclaimer: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETCISO does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETCISO shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organization directly or indirectly.
