In 2026, as companies increasingly look to infuse AI across their operations, a strong, secure, and automated hybrid cloud foundation will become a key competitive advantage.
Cloud complexity is a widespread problem. But transformative companies are taking back control. From streamlining provisioning to tracking real-time spend and building consistent security practices across hybrid landscapes, those that prioritize AI-driven automation will be able to accelerate innovation and optimize their environments. Meanwhile, stragglers will continue to be held back by highly manual, disconnected processes and teams.
In this post, we discuss the biggest hybrid cloud strategy shifts companies will undergo in 2026, and how organizations can begin the pivot today.
»1. Platform teams standardize on infrastructure as code automation
Whether businesses are in the tactical, strategic, or transformative stage of their cloud adoption journey, they’re prioritizing AI-driven automation.
Infrastructure as code (IaC) creates a common foundation that organizations can then use to automate provisioning. Developers can access pre-approved templates through self-service portals to eliminate manual touch points and keep the focus on building new features and applications.
Codified infrastructure is going to be critical to AI-assisted operations because, without IaC, AI doesn’t have any clear, solid context with which to make suggestions and decisions. A unified infrastructure and security platform is going to be key to AI visibility and context.
Today, on average, 56% of infrastructure provisioning and deployments are automated, according to the 2025 Cloud Complexity Report. As the adoption of AI accelerates, this number is poised to grow quickly. And the organizations that can take advantage of automation across their cloud operations will reap the benefits of faster, more secure innovation at scale.
»2. Secrets shift from static to dynamic
The longer secrets hang around, the more of a threat they pose to hybrid cloud environments. And with the fallout from breaches only getting worse, enterprises are increasingly turning to ephemeral, short-lived credentials, SSL certificates, and other secrets.
Companies can’t afford to keep manually managing the massive amount of sensitive information being generated for access to a myriad of systems by a huge number of non-human identities (NHIs). As AI continues to expand the threat surface at organizations, they will see no other truly safe alternative, other than to start converting nearly all static secret workflows to regular automated rotation workflows or dynamic secrets.
More dynamic secrets will narrow the attack surface for hackers, simplify hybrid cloud environments, and improve overall visibility.
»3. Continuous cost management replaces unpredictable bills
As cloud complexity worsens, companies increasingly lose more control over their environments. Monthly spending on infrastructure becomes a guessing game, and overruns become common.
Today, 42% of companies rank predictive cost management as their top infrastructure challenge, per the 2025 Cloud Complexity Report. Control starts with visibility.
Companies need real-time awareness of their cloud spend. When platform teams are quickly alerted to issues like usage spikes or cost overruns, they can mitigate problems before they show up on the cloud bill.
»4. Policy frameworks go from afterthought to the forefront
Businesses that want to accelerate innovation tend to focus on the same goal: removing as many of the provisioning burdens from developers as possible. But too often, that stops at security. Development teams are still expected to add their own manual policies, creating more fragmentation and potentially increasing vulnerabilities.
Another issue is that many security team reviews are still done in a ‘big bang’ workflow that’s bolted on as a very unintegrated process right after developers have fully built and polished their code. After all of that work, developers are often told to go back to the drawing board and fix deep aspects of their code, when a review earlier in the process would have saved dozens or hundreds of hours.
Luckily, as IaC becomes mainstream, policy as code is following in its wake. Policy as code provides those automated security reviews right as developers start to provision test environments, and those reviews are automatic and security-team-sanctioned, not slow, ticket-based workflows that often become a bottleneck on velocity.
Teams are also going to get better at building the right security and compliance frameworks into their infrastructure modules, so that developers have a menu of secure infrastructure from the outset. This is how organizations will make it feasible to ensure consistency in every deployment across hybrid clouds, minimizing security gaps between cloud ecosystems and reducing overall risk. Approved infrastructure modules and policy as code will also help with point #3 by enacting stricter cost controls to optimize infrastructure.
»5. Businesses pivot to a unified, lifecycle view of hybrid infrastructure
Cloud complexity not only divides IT environments, but often keeps internal professionals siloed as well. In 73% of businesses surveyed in the Cloud Complexity Report, engineering and security don’t work as a unified function. As more organizations link their hybrid infrastructure through a common foundation, internal teams will shift from chasing down emergencies to proactive, secure innovation.
For over half of enterprises (51%), a unified lifecycle management platform led to improved collaboration and visibility across their cloud environments, according to the report, while 48% cited faster deployment and scaling of applications.
»Next steps
If you want more insights into where the worlds of infrastructure and security are going in 2026, read the Cloud Complexity Report to see where trends are pointing based on data from 2025.
If you want to learn more about how your organization can take these key next steps in the new year, read Do cloud right with The Infrastructure Cloud.
