Manufacturers are entering a year where security, automation and operational continuity will collide more than ever – and these shifts reflect the realities unfolding in real time. Here are a sharp set of 2026 cyber predictions shaped by what Axians UK is seeing inside modern factories, smart production lines and increasingly connected OT environments.
Dennis Martin, Cyber Security and Crisis Management, Axians UK:
Prediction 1: Crisis readiness will become a board-level KPI
In 2026, organisations will recognise that cyber resilience is not just firewalls and detection tools, but that it hinges on how well people perform under pressure. Crisis readiness will be measured in the same way that organisations track financial or operational performance. Boards will expect regular simulations, scenario planning and cross-department training to become core operational requirements as threats evolve, so that operational staff can take coordinated action when the unexpected happens.
Prediction 2: The rise in AI-powered attacks will force organisations to rethink trust in digital communications
AI-generated phishing, impersonation and deepfake content has already dominated the latter half of 2025, and that will only escalate into 2026 as the tools that enabled this evolve Attackers will no longer need detailed reconnaissance to manipulate employees, as they’ll have the ability to generate convincing messages, voices and video at an unprecedented scale. This will push organisations to adopt far stricter internal verification procedures, from secure communications apps to multi-step confirmation for high-risk decisions.
Prediction 3: Communication failures will continue to cause more damage than the attack itself
Despite improved technical defences, 2026 will highlight the same organisational weakness seen in major incidents today: poor communication during crises. Many organisations will still struggle with what should declare an incident, how to coordinate internally and what it takes to communicate effectively with regulators, partners and customers under pressure. As regulatory pressures increase, particularly around incident reporting and transparency, miscommunication will become an even greater source of reputational and financial damage. Minimising fallout following the inevitable will be the name of the game.
Chris Gilmour, Chief Technology Officer, Axians UK:
Prediction 1: Automated updates will cause almost as many outages as cyber attacks
By 2026, organisations will face more widespread outages caused by automated change processes than malicious activity. As cloud platforms and enterprise systems become increasingly driven by automation, the error margin shrinks, and a single flawed configuration pushed at scale can take critical services offline within seconds. We’ll see more incidents where two updates clash, pipelines promote changes without adequate dependency checks or self-healing systems unintentionally amplify the problem. For many businesses, reliability engineering will become as important as traditional cybersecurity.
Prediction 2: Multi-cloud will mature, but only for those who invest in the foundation
Multi-cloud strategies will move from aspirational to operational in 2026, but the organisations that succeed will be the ones that focus on the fundamentals: identity, observability and data governance. Without these pillars in place, multi-cloud becomes a complexity multiplier rather than a resilience strategy. It goes beyond things like back-ups and failovers, there will be a shift towards unified control planes and consistent access models to reduce the operational risk of running optimally distributed workloads.
Prediction 3: Data gravity will shape architecture decisions more than cost.
In 2026, the biggest driver of architectural change will be data gravity. As organisations generate and move more data across regions and cloud providers, latency, consistency and regulatory constraints will dictate where workloads can realistically run. Businesses will rethink how data is stored, synchronised and processed, particularly those operating real-time applications that cannot tolerate drift between environments. We’ll also see more organisations adopting distributed data meshes and edge-aligned architectures to keep data closer to where it is created and consumed.
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