Cloud, Infrastructure and Digital Transformation in 2026: What Organisations Are Preparing for Now
Cloud adoption has been discussed for well over a decade, yet 2025 quietly marked a turning point. For many organisations, cloud, infrastructure and digital transformation stopped being initiatives and became the operating model.
What matters now isn’t ‘if’ cloud is part of your overarching strategy, but whether it's used deliberately, sustainably, and in a way that supports long-term resilience. As we continue down this road throughout 2026, that very conversation is shifting from experimentation to maturity, which marks a good moment to pause and take stock of what has changed.
If you need pointers into what’s solidifying, or what organisations should be preparing for next, you’re in the right place.
Cloud Is No Longer a Choice. It’s the Baseline
Cloud adoption is effectively universal across enterprise IT - and it’s made its way down to SMEs practices too. In fact, depending on your sources, some industry figures show that more than 90% of organisations now use some form of cloud infrastructure, with the majority running the bulk of their workloads outside traditional on-premise environments. It’s hard to get a tangible grasp - or verify this for 2026 - but a 2024 PwC survey had the number at around 78%.
Since then, what has changed isn’t the level of adoption, although it’s likely to have trended upward, but the criticality of cloud-hosted systems. Customer platforms, internal tooling, analytics, identity services and core business applications increasingly depend on cloud availability and performance.
Make no mistake: this shift has consequences, too.
When the cloud becomes foundational, decisions around architecture, governance, and supplier dependency stop being technical choices and become business risk decisions.
Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Are Signs of Maturity, Not Indecision
Early cloud strategies were often framed as a single destination. You’d choose your provider, migrate workloads, and move on. In practice, 2025 showed that this approach rarely holds up under operational pressure, especially as a number of high-profile outages caused chaos.
In our experience, multi-cloud and hybrid architectures are now steadily becoming the norm for organisations that have moved beyond initial adoption. Why? Well, it’s not about chasing novelty or being reactive to a couple of incidents. It’s actually all about putting that flexibility, resilience, and control back in your hands.
Hybrid environments allow sensitive or regulated workloads to remain closer to home, while still benefiting from cloud elasticity. Multi-cloud strategies reduce dependence on any single provider and allow teams to align platforms with workload needs, rather than forcing everything into a single model.
The key lesson here is that complexity isn’t inherently bad. Unmanaged complexity is. Organisations entering 2026 need to focus less on simplification slogans and more on visibility, governance and operational clarity across environments.
Sovereignty, Compliance and Control Are Back in Focus
Another clear trend that we saw emerge late in 2025 was the renewed emphasis on data sovereignty and regional control. With ever-increasing regulatory pressure, geopolitical uncertainty, and growing awareness of supply-chain risk, organisations have quietly been reshaping how they think about where data lives and, ultimately, who controls it.
Major cloud providers are responding with sovereign cloud offerings designed to meet strict jurisdictional and compliance requirements. Yet enterprises are also reassessing how much autonomy they retain over identity, encryption, access control, and operational oversight.
Is this a signal of a retreat from cloud adoption? Absolutely not.
I’d argue that, instead, it signals a more grown-up relationship with it. This year, organisations that succeed will be those that understand exactly where their data is, how it is protected, and what happens if assumptions about availability or jurisdiction change.
Infrastructure Investment Is Becoming Strategic Again
For a period, infrastructure faded into the background. Cloud abstracts away hardware, data centres and physical constraints, at least on the surface. That abstraction is now wearing thin.
The explosive growth of AI workloads, real-time analytics and always-on digital services has driven renewed focus on the physical layer underpinning the cloud. Data centre capacity, energy availability, network performance and geographic distribution are back on the strategic agenda.
Large-scale investments in new data centres across Europe and North America aren’t speculative or high-scale tax write-offs for your big-name providers. They’re a very valid reflection that digital transformation depends on physical infrastructure as much as software innovation.
For organisations, this reinforces an important point. Cloud doesn’t - and won’t - remove infrastructure concerns. It’ll just relocate them. Understanding how your providers scale, where bottlenecks exist, and how capacity constraints affect your services is becoming part of responsible IT leadership.
Digital Transformation Is Maturing into an Operating Model
Perhaps the most encouraging shift heading into 2026 is the way digital transformation is being reframed. Instead of one-off programmes or technology refreshes, transformation is increasingly treated as an ongoing operating model.
This includes:
Cloud-native platforms designed for continuous change
Integrated analytics and AI used to inform decisions, not just report on them
Automation embedded into workflows rather than bolted on
Platforms that allow faster iteration without sacrificing governance
The organisations that made the most progress last year were rarely those chasing the newest tools. They were the ones aligning technology decisions with how their people actually work, and how services need to scale under pressure.
Sustainability and Resilience Are No Longer Optional Extras
Let’s face it, cloud usage is only going to deepen, and sustainability and resilience are becoming inseparable from infrastructure planning. Energy consumption, carbon impact, and efficiency are key critiques of technology (especially AI and the cloud), and they’re now part of procurement conversations, especially for organisations with ESG commitments.
At the same time, resilience has taken on a broader meaning. It’s not just about preventing outages anymore. It’s about designing systems that degrade gracefully, recover quickly, and maintain trust when things do go wrong.
These considerations are shaping architecture choices, supplier selection and investment priorities. In 2026, infrastructure decisions that ignore sustainability or resilience will increasingly be seen as incomplete.
What This Means for 2026
Looking ahead, we see several themes that are likely to define the year:
Cloud will be treated as core infrastructure, not a specialist domain.
Hybrid and multi-cloud architectures will continue to normalise.
Control, visibility and governance will matter as much as scale.
Physical infrastructure constraints will influence digital strategy.
Transformation will focus on adaptability, not novelty.
For many organisations, the challenge in 2026 will not be deciding what to adopt. It will be deciding what to stabilise, optimise and govern properly. If you’re unsure of how or what this means for your business, why not reach out to our team? We’re here to help you explore your journey and guide you along the way.
Final Thought
The cloud and digital infrastructure landscape at the start of 2026 is calmer than the hype cycles of the past, but far more consequential. The decisions being made now can (and will) shape operational resilience, cost control and competitive advantage for years to come.
This is a good moment to step back, assess maturity honestly, and ensure that cloud and infrastructure strategies are built for the reality organisations are operating in today, not the promises that were made yesterday.