What CISOs revealed about 2026: The visibility reality-check the industry needs

Towards the end of last year, we surveyed over 400 enterprise cybersecurity leaders across the US and the UK working with real budgets, real threats, and real pressure, to understand what's keeping them up at night as we enter 2026.

The results revealed three acute pressures: AI-driven threats outpacing defenses, resource constraints demanding ruthless prioritization, and regulatory complexity with personal consequences. The gap between what leaders prioritize and what they can actually deliver is widening.

In this blog, we explore the realities of these three pressures and what it means for operating models.

Three pressures defining CISO priorities in 2026

According to the CISOs we interviewed, the industry faces three acute pressures:

• AI-powered threats that outpace existing defenses.
• Resource constraints and budget limitations that demand ruthless prioritization.

• Increasingly stringent regulation that holds executives and CISOs to account – and in many cases, personally liable.

First; AI is the new threat battleground

Over three-quarters (77%) of security leaders agree that AI threats are evolving faster than their ability to respond.

AI-powered attacks are evolving in sophistication and scale. CISOs are rightly concerned about deepfake-enabled social engineering (33%), AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery (38%), threat actors are leveraging automation to outpace traditional defenses(62%).

It’s forcing security teams to fight automation with automation - making real-time, automated controls monitoring not just efficient, but necessary for survival.

Dig deeper: How AI is reshaping cybersecurity for 2026 

Second: Resilience and cyber hygiene top the fundamentals once again

Half of CISOs (49%) have made cyber resilience their number one strategic priority for 2026.

This is no surprise when some of the biggest breaches in 2025 caused catastrophic operational failures for the organizations in question – most notably Jaguar Land Rover and Marks & Spencer in the UK. Downtime costs (JLR) and the on-going reputational damage demonstrate that cyber resilience is now at the heart of operational efficiency.

Strong cyber resilience is emphasising once again the importance of cyber hygiene and getting the basics right. Resilience is about doing the fundamentals really, really well.

But resilience is hard to build when 63% of leaders say their IT and cloud environments are becoming too complex to manage effectively. And it's harder still when 43% say senior executives simply don't understand what true cyber resilience actually requires. It’s a stakeholder management, communication and capability challenge wrapped into one.

Third: the regulatory tsunami with personal liability

The regulatory landscape is intensifying at an unprecedented pace. Over half (54%) of CISOs worry about personal liability in the event of a breach, yet only 40% feel completely confident they're staying on top of regulatory changes.

This pressure isn't theoretical. Regulations like DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) now mandate continuous monitoring and controls validation for financial services—making continuous controls monitoring a compliance requirement, not a choice. NIS2 is extending similar requirements across critical infrastructure sectors, while other jurisdictions are implementing comparable frameworks.

The shift represents a fundamental change: regulators no longer accept point-in-time audits as evidence of security effectiveness. They want proof of continuous assurance, real-time visibility, and rapid remediation capabilities. For CISOs, this means compliance and security operations are converging—and both demand automated, continuous controls validation.

The good news? You’re not facing these challenges alone

Leaders across industries - from financial services to manufacturing, healthcare to technology - are confronting the same visibility gaps, the same board communication challenges, and the same complexity overload.

What separates organizations building resilience from those struggling is not budget or team size. It's the shift from manual, periodic security processes to automated, continuous assurance. The CISOs confidently navigating 2026's pressures have made this transition. The following five priorities create a roadmap to get you there.

The five priorities you need at the top of your to-do list

To help manage these strategic pressures, your 2026 roadmap needs to address five specific challenges where visibility, validation, and continuous assurance capabilities make the difference between strong cyber hygiene and disruption.

1. Cloud security, legacy systems and the misconfiguration roulette

Cloud is a growing battlefield. Two thirds (65%) of cybersecurity leaders told us they have experienced incidents stemming from misconfigured cloud services – and is which is why 40% of CISOs are prioritizing improving cloud security in 2026.

Just over one-third (37%) of CISOs are confident they have full visibility across their IT estate. The complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud environments has outpaced visibility and is outpacing effective security controls. Many CISOs are at a loss, with almost two-thirds (61%) stating their controls environment is too complex to confidently manage without automation

Dig deeper: Why complex IT environments deliver less visibility 

2. You can't protect what you can't see

61% of CISOs lack any real-time visibility into whether their controls are actually working. And perhaps more sobering, over half (54%) agree that control failures often go undetected until after an incident occurs.

It’s clear that CISOs need better visibility into their operations – but gaining that visibility across complex IT environments with growing tool sprawls is extremely complex.

Organizations are managing an average of 61 security tools and navigating 58 different dashboards.

This fragmentation creates blind spots, wastes team time, and makes it impossible to answer a basic question: "Are my controls actually working?" The absence of clear visibility doesn't mean threats aren't happening. It means you won't see them until it's too late.

Dig deeper: Why security control failures are a challenge in cybersecurity

3. The board doesn't speak your language, but you need to speak theirs

45% of security leaders struggle to communicate cyber risk to non-technical stakeholders.

This isn't about ‘dumbing down’ the message for executives with a non-technical background. It's about CISOs and their teams speaking the language of the business: revenue impact, operational disruption, brand damage, shareholder liability.

The CISO role has evolved beyond IT security into business risk management, compliance oversight, and data governance. When your board communications sound like technical jargon, you lose the argument before you start.

Translate technical metrics into business insight. Don't simplify.

4. When vendor risk means your weakest link might not be your team

Only 21% of CISOs are prioritizing vendor risk management in 2026, yet 38% cite gaps in vendor offerings as a barrier to true cyber resilience. Supply chain attacks are accelerating, but vendor risk programs remain immature.

This is the classic case of something important being deprioritized until it becomes urgent - and then it's too late.

The key is to start simple. Which critical vendors do you depend on? How do you verify their security posture? What's your incident response plan if they breach? If you can't answer these questions, it’s time to start tracking your vendor management in 2026.

5. Compliance is now a moving target with personal consequences

The regulatory tsunami is real. Over half (54%) of CISOs worry about personal liability in the event of a breach, yet worryingly only 40% are completely confident they're on top of all the regulatory changes happening.

Compliance has moved beyond professional risk. In many of the latest regulations coming into force, CISOs face personal legal exposure for negligence or non-compliance. That's a game changer in how you prioritize and communicate with boards.

Three capabilities to consider in 2026 that support stronger cyber resilience

The data all points to a clear strategic path that enterprise CISOs are embracing in 2026.

It's not about buying more tools or hiring more people - it's about fundamentally shifting how teams operate. Understanding and acknowledging the pressures faced by CISOs is one step– building the capabilities to address them is where leading cyber teams are already focusing.

Capability 1: automation over manual workarounds

Automation in some shape or form should be high on your priority list – and for 23% of enterprise CISOs surveyed, automating key processes is their number one strategic priority for the year.

There’s no doubt that automation improves your overall operational efficiency. Every hour your team spends on manual data gathering, log analysis, or compliance preparation is an hour not spent on strategic work. When headcount isn’t growing proportionally with threats, automation (whether AI-powered or not) isn’t no longer a nice-to-have.

Organizations that automate manual processes don't just improve efficiency but free up capacity for genuine risk reduction. One enterprise CISO working with Panaseer saw a 64% reduction in vulnerability detections in one year, demonstrating how using an automated controls assurance approach can provide the visibility and capacity to manage cyber risk more effectively.

Automated controls monitoring is already transforming how some teams validate security effectiveness. It’s why half (48%) of CISOs believe that automating manual data gathering could dramatically reduce risk.

Capability 2: continuous controls assurance over point-in-time Audits

Eight out of ten of enterprise CISOs plan to prioritize continuous controls assurance in the next 12 months – unsurprising when over two thirds (65%) say point-in-time audits are completely insufficient for today's threat landscape.

Traditional audits are a moment in time. But we all know threats are 24/7. Almost every CISO (93%) we interviewed agreed that continuous controls validation provides the on-going assurance they need to improve overall compliance.

Organizations currently waste, on average, eight working days preparing for each audit. Continuous controls monitoring (CCM) has been proven to cut audit preparation and resourcing for enterprise customers by 75%. The business impact alone justifies the investment.

Capability 3: resilience-focused enterprise response

Just three-quarters (74%) are somewhat confident they could withstand coordinated attacks targeting AI, identity, and third-party systems simultaneously. That's a gap worth addressing.

As one CISO described “managing growing regulatory pressure while keeping up with increasingly sophisticated cyber threats” as the biggest challenge facing them over the next 12 months. “AI is a huge threat to our systems as there are still so many unknowns, so we cannot develop appropriate protocols to combat these if we need to.”

Confident, leading CISOs are validating the effectiveness their defenses continuously.. The 26% gap represents those still relying on periodic controls testing and manual coordination.

Why continuous controls validation matters for enterprise security

Security controls validation continuously verifies that security measures are functioning as designed and providing the intended protection. Unlike traditional testing that occurs at fixed intervals, modern controls validation through CCM provides ongoing, automated verification across the entire security ecosystem.

For enterprise organizations managing complex, hybrid IT environments with dozens of security tools, manual controls validation is no longer feasible. Automated, continuous validation ensures that misconfigurations, drift, and failures are detected immediately - not weeks later during an audit or, worse, after a breach.

Panaseer's Continuous Controls Monitoring platform enables enterprises to achieve this shift, aggregating data across security tools to provide real-time visibility into control effectiveness.

CCM isn't about replacing or automating audits. It's about understanding your security posture in real-time so audit prep, cyber risk management, and executive reporting become a simple data pull instead of a constant scramble.

What the results mean for your strategic roadmap in 2026

The data paints a picture of an industry under genuine pressure. Your peers have identified what matters most, and they're willing to invest in it.

1. Make resilience your north star. This changes how you think operational efficiency, investments and leadership conversations – and amplifies your need for data to ground smart, data-driven choices.
2. Automate relentlessly. Manual processes are burning resource unnecessarily. Every process you automate frees up capacity for strategic work and reduces burnout.
3. Invest in visibility. You can't manage what you can't see. You real-time insight into your entire IT environment, surfacing validated assent inventories and controls performance data.
4. Translate for the board. Business impact, not technical architecture. That's the commercial language of resource, budget and operational resilience.
5. Get serious about vendor risk. Supply chain attacks are accelerating. Your vendor assessment program should be as mature as your internal security program.
6. Build for continuous assurance. Point-in-time audits are theater. Continuous controls monitoring is at the heart of any digital resilience program (and why DORA mandates continuous monitoring and controls validation).

Take the first step toward continuous assurance

The transition to continuous controls monitoring doesn't require ripping out existing tools or rebuilding your security program from scratch. It starts with visibility: aggregating data from the tools you already have to answer the fundamental question - are my controls working?

Leading enterprises are making this shift now (or have made the investment already), building the visibility and assurance capabilities that will define resilience in 2026.

As an industry, cyber leaders are shifting from reactive firefighting to proactive, business-aligned cyber risk management. What you need now, more than ever is data.