As 2025 comes to a close, it is clear this has been a year of rapid technological acceleration. Advancements in AI moved from experimentation to active deployment, security and infrastructure demands intensified, and organizations were required to adapt faster while continuing to support day-to-day operations. This past year exposed the operational pressure many organizations are under, from talent constraints and security complexity to licensing volatility.

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As IT teams look ahead to 2026, the focus is shifting toward predictability, governance, and execution models that can absorb change without slowing delivery. Based on what we’ve seen delivering real-world projects and services, here are three key takeaways shaping technology planning for the year ahead.

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The Talent Bottleneck

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Access to experienced, execution-ready tech talent is becoming slower, more expensive, and less predictable across North America. This is not a competence issue. It is a capacity and availability challenge.

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Hiring cycles continue to lengthen, senior talent is increasingly stretched between strategy and day-to-day operations, and competition for specialists in cloud, security, AI, and endpoint management remains intense. As a result, many IT teams are spending more time maintaining systems than driving transformation forward.

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In response, we’re seeing a growing shift toward managed services. Organizations are dealing with too many platforms to manage, too much operational overhead, and not enough internal bandwidth to focus on strategy.

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Looking into 2026, more organizations will rely on managed services to stabilize operations and protect execution velocity. At BITSUMMIT, our managed services are designed to reduce operational drag so internal teams can focus on outcomes, not upkeep.

Cybersecurity & AI

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In 2025, AI became an active participant in cybersecurity on both sides. Organizations are using AI to strengthen security operations, while attackers are using the same technologies to scale and refine their methods.

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On the defensive side, AI is improving threat detection, automating incident response and triage, identifying anomalies faster than human analysts, and increasing SOC efficiency by reducing alert fatigue. These capabilities are quickly becoming foundational. At the same time, attackers are leveraging AI to create more convincing phishing campaigns, automate vulnerability discovery, bypass traditional detection tools, and scale attacks with less manual effort. This has raised the baseline for what effective security requires.

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What 2025 made clear is that AI-enabled security must be paired with strong governance. In 2026, organizations will embed AI more deeply into cybersecurity operations while defining clear guardrails around how AI is trained, accessed, monitored, and audited to reduce risk.

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We explored this shift in more detail in our recent blog, AI Is No Longer a Tool. It Is an Org Function. Here’s What 2025 Really Exposed.

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Licensing Shifts

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Another key lesson from 2025 was how quickly licensing changes can reshape the economics of core platforms. VMware’s licensing shifts pushed many organizations into subscription-only models, larger bundles, and higher, less predictable costs. Similar pressures are emerging across infrastructure, security, and analytics platforms.

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The broader takeaway is that licensing is no longer just a procurement concern. It is now an architectural, financial, and operational risk, where stable platforms can become cost liabilities with little warning.

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As a result, organizations are reassessing long-standing platform decisions and planning licensing strategy earlier in the infrastructure lifecycle. This shift is driving renewed interest in options like Hyper-V, where predictability and tighter integration matter as much as feature depth.

Looking Ahead to 2026

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The pace of change is not slowing. As AI adoption accelerates, security expectations rise, and platform decisions carry greater financial impact, organizations will need to be more deliberate about how they plan, operate, and execute in the year ahead.

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If you are mapping out IT priorities for 2026 or looking to address a specific challenge, whether it is operational capacity, security readiness, or infrastructure strategy, BITSUMMIT can help you navigate what comes next with clarity and confidence.

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