2026 Cybersecurity Predictions: A Q&A with Head of SOC, Biren Patel
As security teams prepare for 2026, the threat landscape continues to shift faster than many technologies – and organizations – can keep up with. Attackers are evolving away from traditional “break in through the network” models toward identity abuse, cloud pivots, and multi-stage attacks that blur the line between environments.
To better understand where cybersecurity is heading, we sat down with Biren Patel, Senior Manager of our Americas SOC at Ontinue, to get his frontline perspective on the biggest trends shaping threats and defense in the year ahead.
Q: Biren, what’s the biggest shift you expect to see in 2026?
Biren:
Identity will fully replace the network as the primary security perimeter.
Attackers are no longer leading with network exploitation. Their first goal is to compromise cloud identities, particularly Azure identities, and use valid credentials to move through environments unnoticed. We’re seeing more focus on stealing storage keys, SAS tokens, Key Vault credentials, and abusing SSO pathways to move laterally.
Organizations that don’t harden identity protections or fully implement strong Conditional Access policies are going to experience a sharp rise in account-based breaches. Identity isn’t just “important” anymore, it is the perimeter.
Q: How does that affect hybrid environments that still rely heavily on on-prem systems?
Biren:
This is where a major shift is happening. In 2026, cloud compromise will often be the starting point for on-prem intrusion, not the end goal.
Attackers compromise a cloud identity, locate a VPN app in MyApps, and pivot directly into the internal network – sometimes without setting off any traditional SOC alarms. Once inside, they look for weakly protected legacy systems or IoT and OT environments that weren’t designed for today’s threat landscape.
Cloud-to-on-prem pivoting is no longer theoretical, it’s becoming a very real and increasingly common attack pathway.
Q: Which environments will be most at risk next year?
Biren:
IoT and OT environments will become the fastest-growing breach vector.
Manufacturing has long been a target because the equipment is often old, difficult to patch, and expensive to replace, but this issue extends well beyond manufacturing. Any industry that uses industrial controllers, connected sensors, or specialized legacy infrastructure is at risk.
These systems are frequently misconfigured, sometimes publicly accessible, and nearly always harder to monitor than traditional endpoints. Attackers know this and are increasingly using IoT and OT devices as their easiest path to persistence and lateral movement.
Q: Ransomware remains a major concern. How is that evolving?
Biren:
Ransomware timelines are shrinking dramatically.
Many ransomware families can already encrypt systems in about 15 minutes. In 2026, that window will continue to shrink as attackers streamline payloads and automate deployment. This puts enormous pressure on response teams.
Manual investigation simply can’t keep pace anymore. Organizations will require automated enrichment, agentic AI support, and rapid validation workflows to interrupt ransomware before widespread encryption occurs. Speed now matters just as much as detection accuracy.
Q: How is that changing the way SOC teams operate?
Biren:
We’re moving from query-driven to decision-driven SOC operations.
Traditional investigations often require analysts to run multiple queries in Sentinel, manually correlate data, and piece together a narrative before making a decision. That workflow is too slow for today’s threat pace.
In 2026, AI agents will increasingly pre-summarize alerts, run validation checks, gather evidence, and surface likely hypotheses. Analysts will spend less time pulling logs and more time exercising judgment, confirming threats and initiating response actions. Human expertise doesn’t disappear; it becomes more focused and impactful.
Q: What about day-to-day user behaviors and policies, any concerns there?
Biren:
BYOD and hybrid cloud policies will continue to expand the unmanaged attack surface.
Personal devices connecting to corporate cloud apps are much harder to secure, patch, and monitor consistently. Attackers are already probing this entry point for easier credential theft and session hijacking opportunities.
Next year, we’ll see more breaches that begin with unmanaged devices paired with overly permissive access policies. Organizations need to rethink how they enforce device compliance and conditional access if they’re going to allow flexible work models securely.
Q: Supply chain attacks seem persistent. Is that threat diminishing at all?
Biren:
Not even close – it’s getting worse.
Recent incidents involving poisoned NPM packages showed how a single compromised dependency can ripple across thousands of organizations simultaneously.
In 2026, we’ll see increased attacks on DevOps pipelines, package maintainers, and software dependencies. Detection is particularly challenging because indicators often only appear once malicious packages begin behaving abnormally at runtime. That means stronger behavioral monitoring—not just static scanning—will be essential.
Q: If you had to leave organizations with one key takeaway for 2026, what would it be?
Biren:
Security teams need to stop thinking in silos.
Identity, cloud, on-prem, IoT, ransomware, and supply chain risk are all converging into single, continuous attack chains. Defenders need visibility and response workflows that span those boundaries, not point solutions that protect one corner of the environment.
The organizations that succeed will be the ones that combine strong identity hygiene, automated investigations, agentic AI support, and experienced SOC analysts working together as one coordinated defense.
The cybersecurity challenges brewing for 2026 are not theoretical, they’re rooted in the attacks security teams are already responding to today. Identity abuse, cloud pivoting, IoT exploitation, shrinking ransomware timelines, and evolving SOC workflows are all converging at once.
As Biren’s insights make clear, the future of security operations belongs to teams that can move quickly, think holistically, and leverage automation and AI without losing the human judgment required to make critical decisions.