From Edge to AI to Zero Trust: The five platform decisions that will define enterprise resilience in 2026

By Peter Lees, Head of Solution Architecture in Asia-Pacific, SUSE

2026 isn’t the year to still be pondering future-proofing; it’s the year to act. Clinging to proprietary, single-vendor tech isn’t just a financial risk, it has long-term ramifications and can even pose an existential threat to your business.
Five trends to keep an eye on next year:

Resilience is key to progress. The drumbeat of digital sovereignty, echoing loudly from precedents like the EU, means enterprises must secure control of data and platform proactively. Choosing flexible, open options is a pragmatic approach providing governance that shields you from enormous migration costs and arbitrary price hikes from vendors needing to recover huge takeover investments.

Second, edge computing is exploding. Smart factories, retail kiosks, remote healthcare: data is being created and acted upon everywhere. If you can’t securely manage and unify these thousands of new data points at the Edge, you’re losing efficiency and competitiveness. Containerisation is the clear strategy for managing this distribution and scale.

Third, our defensive cyber stance is outdated. Perimeter defense is unsustainable. The future lies in a zero-trust security model: “never trust, always verify.” Since achieving zero vulnerabilities is fantasy, the core metric must shift to preventing the exploitation of weaknesses at the moment of execution. That means highly reliable, secure-by-default software, especially at the container level.

Fourth, AI is a shapeshifter, demanding context-aware, secure-by-design infrastructure to match. Success hinges on strategically adopting open source approaches that maintain platform flexibility and privacy standards at the same time.

Finally, strategic openness is the ultimate insurance policy. By building on open foundations, you secure a powerful, resilient platform that offers choice. This flexibility insulates your financial plan from vendor whims and ensures you can adapt to technologies that haven’t even been named yet.