Posts tagged ‘AI agents’

Top 6 cybersecurity trends from Gartner’s 2026 Security Forecast

Over 57% of employees are using personal GenAI accounts for work. A third of them admit to uploading sensitive data into tools their security teams haven’t approved. Meanwhile, agentic AI is proliferating through no-code platforms and vibe coding, creating attack surfaces most CISOs can’t see, let alone govern. And quantum computing? No longer a 10-year planning horizon. It’s a 2030 action deadline.

Gartner’s Top Trends in Cybersecurity for 2026 report, released February 5, 2026, identifies six forces reshaping how CISOs must operate. These cut across governance, AI adoption, identity, workforce, and cryptographic strategy simultaneously. None of them is incremental.

The trends report lands alongside Gartner’s updated Forecast: Information Security, Worldwide, 2023–2029, 4Q25 (G00843183, December 18, 2025) and the Forecast Analysis: Information Security, Worldwide, 2026 (G00838442, February 5, 2026), which together project global information security spending reaching $244.2 billion in 2026, up 13.3% in current U.S. dollars. I’ve tracked this forecast through multiple quarterly updates. The trajectory keeps steepening. The six trends below explain where that money is going and why.

“Cybersecurity leaders are navigating uncharted territory this year as these forces converge, testing the limits of their teams in an environment defined by constant change,” said Alex Michaels, Director Analyst at Gartner. “This demands new approaches to cyber risk management, resilience, and resource allocation.”

The spending backdrop: $244 billion and accelerating

Before getting into the six trends, context matters. Gartner’s 4Q25 forecast shows the three major security segments all growing at double-digit constant currency rates in 2026:

Source: Gartner Forecast: Information Security, Worldwide, 2023–2029, 4Q25 Update (G00843183). Constant currency rates.

Cloud security remains the fastest-growing subsegment at 28.8% growth in 2026. Nothing else comes close. The combined cloud security market (cloud security posture management, cloud access security brokers, and cloud workload protection platforms) is projected to reach $32.4 billion by 2029, with a 25% CAGR in constant currency. I’ve been watching this subsegment accelerate for three quarters straight. CSPM alone is growing at a 31.30% CAGR.

Cloud security spending reaches $32.4 billion by 2029. CSPM leads at 31.30% CAGR. Source: Gartner 4Q25 Forecast. (Please click on the image to expand for easier reading)

Trend 1: Agentic AI demands cybersecurity oversight

This is the trend that touches everything else on this list. Employees and developers are deploying AI agents through no-code/low-code platforms and “vibe coding” at a pace that outstrips security governance. Unmanaged AI agent proliferation. Unsecured code. Compliance violations that most security teams don’t even have visibility into yet. That’s the picture Gartner is painting.

Gartner’s recommendation is blunt: cybersecurity leaders must identify both sanctioned and unsanctioned AI agents operating within their environments, enforce access controls and data guardrails, and develop incident response playbooks specific to agent-driven threats.

“While AI agents and automation tools are becoming increasingly accessible and practical for organizations to adopt, strategic cybersecurity planning for these technologies is essential,” said Michaels. Cybersecurity leaders must work cross-functionally to manage agentic AI adoption, identifying sanctioned and unsanctioned AI agents, enforcing data access controls, and developing incident response playbooks.

The spending data backs this up. Gartner’s 4Q25 forecast projects the AI-amplified security market reaching $160 billion by 2029, up from $49 billion in 2025. Gartner is clear that this isn’t additive spending. It represents the portion of existing security products that now embed AI capabilities. But the expectation tells the story: over 75% of enterprises will use AI-amplified cybersecurity products by 2028, up from less than 25% in 2025. Vendors that don’t embed AI will lose shelf space. (For more on AI security platforms, see Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2026, which predicts that over 50% of enterprises will use AI security platforms to protect their AI investments by 2028.)

Trend 2: Global regulatory volatility drives cyber resilience efforts

Regulators are getting personal. Boards and executives now face direct liability for compliance failures. Not just organizational fines, but individual accountability. The penalties for inaction have moved from theoretical to career-ending. Across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.

Gartner advises cybersecurity leaders to formalize collaboration across legal, business, and procurement teams to establish clear accountability for cyber risk. Align control frameworks to recognized standards. Address data sovereignty concerns before they become enforcement actions. The organizations doing this well are treating regulatory preparedness as a core security function, not an annual compliance checkbox.

This is where the spending data gets interesting. Gartner’s forecast shows security consulting services growing from $24.2 billion (2024) to $36.6 billion (2029), adding $12.4 billion in five years. Security professional services follow a similar trajectory: $27.3 billion to $40.8 billion, adding $13.5 billion. Organizations are buying outside expertise because they can’t build regulatory competence fast enough in-house. I’ve been covering these numbers for three quarters, and the services growth is the part of the forecast that keeps surprising me.

Infrastructure protection adds $26.4 billion between 2024 and 2029, the largest absolute growth of any subsegment. Source: Gartner 4Q25 Forecast. (Please click on the image to expand for easier reading)

Trend 3: Post-quantum computing moves into action plans

Gartner predicts advances in quantum computing will render the asymmetric cryptography that organizations rely on unsafe by 2030. Four years. That’s the window to adopt post-quantum cryptography alternatives before “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks start cashing in on data that adversaries are collecting today.

Organizations need to identify their cryptographic deployments, assess data sensitivity and lifespan, and prioritize cryptographic agility. That last phrase keeps coming up in my conversations with CISOs. The ability to swap encryption methods without re-architecting entire systems. Swapping an algorithm is one thing. Doing it across a production environment without downtime is an entirely different problem.

“Post-quantum cryptography is reshaping cybersecurity strategies by prompting organizations to identify, manage, and replace traditional encryption methods, while prioritizing cryptographic agility,” said Michaels. “By investing in these capabilities and prioritizing migration now, assets will be secured when quantum threats become a reality.“

The encryption market in Gartner’s 4Q25 forecast grows from $1.04 billion in 2023 to $2.04 billion by 2029 at an 11.95% CAGR. A 2.0x increase. For what has historically been one of the slower-growing security subsegments, that’s a significant acceleration. Quantum urgency is changing the math.

Trend 4: Identity and access management adapts to AI agents

AI agents are breaking traditional IAM models. Plain and simple. Identity registration and governance, credential automation, and policy-driven authorization weren’t designed for autonomous machine actors that can initiate actions, access data, and interact with systems without human intervention. The scale problem compounds fast: when every employee can deploy dozens of AI agents, the identity surface area explodes.

Gartner recommends a targeted, risk-based approach. Invest where gaps and risks are greatest. Leverage automation where possible. The practical starting point is understanding which AI agents carry the most privilege and the least oversight. Those are your highest-risk identities right now, and most organizations haven’t inventoried them.

The identity market is already significant. Gartner’s 4Q25 forecast shows identity access management growing from $18.7 billion (2024) to $29.0 billion (2029), adding $10.3 billion in five years. That’s before the full scale of agentic AI identity requirements hits the market. IAM vendors that solve machine-actor identity at scale will capture a disproportionate share of that $10.3 billion growth.

Trend 5: AI-driven SOC solutions destabilize operational norms

AI-enabled security operations centers are enhancing alert triage and investigation workflows. The technology works. But deploying AI into a SOC doesn’t automatically reduce headcount needs. It changes the skill mix. Analysts who excelled at manual triage need different capabilities to oversee AI-driven workflows. Organizations are discovering this the hard way. That’s an organizational transformation challenge, and throwing more technology at it doesn’t help.

“To realize the full potential of AI in security operations, cybersecurity leaders must prioritize people as much as technology,” said Michaels. “Strengthening workforce capabilities, implementing human-in-the-loop frameworks into AI-supported processes and aligning adoption with clear strategic objectives will be critical to maintaining resilience as SOCs evolve.”

The talent dimension makes this harder than it already sounds. ISC2’s 2024 Cybersecurity Workforce Study, published in October 2024, documented a global workforce gap of 4.8 million professionals, a 19% year-over-year increase. The active workforce flatlined at 5.5 million (up just 0.1%). The numbers are brutal: 25% of organizations reported cybersecurity layoffs in 2024. 37% faced budget cuts. 90% report skills shortages. 58% believe the shortage puts their organization at significant risk. On the spending side, managed security services are growing at 11.1% in 2026, the fastest rate in the services segment. Organizations can’t hire fast enough, so they’re buying managed SOC capacity instead.

Trend 6: GenAI breaks traditional cybersecurity awareness tactics

Existing security awareness programs are failing. Full stop. A Gartner survey of 175 employees conducted between May and November 2025 found that 57% use personal GenAI accounts for work purposes, while 33% admit to uploading sensitive information to tools their organizations haven’t sanctioned. Those numbers should alarm every CISO reading this. A third of your workforce is actively feeding proprietary data into tools you can’t audit.

Gartner recommends shifting from general awareness training to adaptive behavioral programs that include AI-specific tasks. Generic compliance videos won’t cut it here. The organizations getting this right are making approved GenAI tools easy to access and unsanctioned tools hard to justify. Trying to ban GenAI outright just drives usage underground and costs you talent.

Strengthening governance, embedding secure practices, and establishing clear policies for authorized GenAI use will reduce exposure to privacy breaches and intellectual property loss. The governance gap on GenAI usage is, in my view, the most underestimated risk on this entire list. Every other trend has a spending line item attached to it. This one requires behavioral change, which is harder to buy.

Total market trajectory: $173.5 billion to $323.5 billion

Gartner’s year-by-year spending trajectory shows the acceleration curve these six trends are riding:

Source: Gartner Forecast: Information Security, Worldwide, 2023–2029, 4Q25 Update (G00843183, December 18, 2025). Current U.S. dollars.

CSPM and CASB lead all security categories with 31% and 26% CAGR through 2029. Source: Gartner 4Q25 Forecast. (Please click on the image to expand for easier reading)

What this means for CISOs

Three of the six trends (agentic AI oversight, IAM for machine actors, and GenAI awareness) are fundamentally about the same problem: autonomous AI systems operating inside enterprise environments without adequate governance. The other three (regulatory volatility, post-quantum readiness, and AI-driven SOCs) are the structural forces those governance failures will collide with. That convergence is the signal about where 2026 budgets need to go.

The organizations that will navigate this environment successfully are doing three things simultaneously:

Mapping their AI agent footprint now. If you don’t know how many AI agents are operating across your environment, sanctioned and unsanctioned, you can’t govern what you can’t see. Gartner’s 75% AI-amplified product adoption projection by 2028 means this window for establishing control is narrow.

Building cryptographic agility into their architecture. The 2030 quantum deadline means migration planning starts in 2026, not 2028. The encryption market’s 2.0x growth reflects early movers. Late movers face rip-and-replace costs that compound every quarter they wait.

Investing in people alongside AI tooling. AI-enabled SOCs work when human operators have the skills to oversee them. The ISC2 data is unambiguous: a 4.8 million professional gap growing at 19% year-over-year. Managed security services growth at 11.1% tells you where CISOs are finding capacity.

Gartner’s numbers aren’t projections anymore. They’re procurement trends already hitting finance systems. The $244.2 billion flowing into information security this year will fund agentic AI governance, quantum migration, and SOC transformation, whether your organization participates or not.

Bottom line: CISOs planning for 2027 are watching their competitors buy the tools they’ll be scrambling for in 18 months. The data says move now.