Cybersecurity is no longer a purely technical issue — it has become a systemic risk.
The Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026, published by the World Economic Forum, outlines a landscape in which cyber incidents no longer affect individual organizations in isolation. Instead, they propagate across entire ecosystems: supply chains, critical infrastructures, and essential services. The combined effects of artificial intelligence, geopolitical fragmentation, and growing reliance on cloud platforms are amplifying the impact of every failure.
Source: World Economic Forum – Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026
When resilience is no longer an individual concern
One of the report’s clearest messages is that resilience can no longer be assessed at the organizational level alone. Vulnerabilities in smaller suppliers, uneven maturity across ecosystems, and concentrated dependencies create systemic exposure. What was once a localized incident can now escalate into widespread disruption.
From an operational perspective, this is where many security strategies fall short: organizations protect their own perimeter but fail to govern the broader ecosystem they depend on.
AI, automation, and new asymmetries
The report highlights how artificial intelligence is accelerating both defensive and offensive capabilities. While larger organizations advance in detection and automation, others lag behind due to limited resources or expertise. This cyber resilience gap increases global risk: attackers increasingly target the weakest link rather than the final objective.
The challenge is not adopting AI itself, but doing so without sufficient control, visibility, and governance.
Cloud platforms and risk concentration
Another critical factor is the concentration of cloud services. Highly efficient platforms have become shared points of dependency. Recent incidents — not always security-related — have shown how configuration errors or provider-level failures can cascade downstream with significant operational impact.
The question is no longer whether cloud environments are secure, but how architectures are designed to absorb failures without disrupting operations.
Cyber resilience as an operational discipline
The report concludes that cyber resilience must be treated as a continuous strategic and operational capability. It is not built through tools alone, but through governable architectures, cross-domain visibility, and tested response and recovery plans.
At TeraLevel, we consistently see that the core issue is not technology itself, but how it is operated day to day. Addressing these scenarios requires combining prevention, early detection, and real recovery capabilities, especially in complex cloud and hybrid environments.
Conclusion
The Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 reinforces a fundamental shift: cybersecurity is no longer a support function, but a pillar of economic continuity and digital trust. Organizations that treat resilience as a systemic attribute — rather than a technical checklist — will be better positioned to navigate an environment where failures increasingly transcend organizational boundaries.
In upcoming analyses, we will explore how this global context translates into concrete obligations for European organizations, particularly under DORA and NIS2, where cyber resilience moves from recommendation to operational requirement.