The UK official National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) recently revealed that the UK faces an average of four “nationally significant” cyberattacks every week. The numbers illustrate just how far cyber risk has evolved from a background concern to a national challenge. For organisations, the impact is undeniable, writes Marc Jones, Regional Director, UK and Ireland, at the platform Armis.
The past year has challenged many UK businesses to rethink what cybersecurity really means. Following a series of large-scale incidents across retail, manufacturing and critical infrastructure, the mindset has clearly shifted. Cybersecurity is no longer defined by prevention alone, but by the ability to maintain business continuity when disruption occurs. In 2026, that change in mindset will play out across every sector, influencing how businesses approach technology, infrastructure and the resilience of the systems they depend on.
1). Retail learns the cost of cyber disruption
Few sectors have experienced as much turbulence this year as retail. A wave of cyber incidents hit household names including Harrods, Marks & Spencer (pictured) and Co-op, underscoring how a single disruption can ripple through an entire business. The Harrods breach alone, which exposed more than 430,000 customer records through a third-party provider, highlighted the risks hidden within modern supply chains.
The financial fallout has been significant. The M&S attack, which halted online orders and click and collect services for 15 weeks, cost the firm £300m in lost profits and forced operational changes. But these incidents pushed resilience from a back-office concern to a board-level priority.
As retailers plan for the year ahead, the focus is shifting from short-term fixes to long-term capability. Organisations are investing in a clearer understanding of the thousands of connected assets that underpin operations – from point-of-sale terminals and handheld scanners to logistics and inventory platforms – and how those assets interact across partners and suppliers. The challenge for 2026 will be turning that visibility into sustained resilience, underpinned by the ability to detect issues early, prioritise what matters most and act before disruption cascades through the business.
2). Financial services confront the limits of legacy tech
For financial institutions across the UK, 2026 will be defined by the tension between innovation and infrastructure. The sector is racing to support new payment types – from instant payments to stablecoins – yet much of this innovation sits atop legacy systems never designed for the pace or openness of today’s financial ecosystem.
The result is an expanding attack surface. Every new API connection, third-party integration or fintech partnership introduces another layer of technical and operational dependency. But they also magnify the challenge: maintaining the same level of resilience across increasingly complex networks of systems and suppliers.
Beneath the digital layer, a less visible form of risk is also emerging. Many financial institutions occupy leased premises and shared data centre environments where building management systems, including heating, cooling, and physical access controls, are operated by third-party vendors. These dependencies often fall outside the traditional cybersecurity remit, yet any disruption can halt trading floors or payment infrastructure just as easily as a network failure.
Heading into 2026, financial organisations must re-evaluate their entire ecosystem and treat exposure management as a continuous discipline. The right partners can help uncover hidden dependencies and create a clearer understanding of how systems connect – building resilience into every layer of operations.
3). Closing the gap between IT and operations
For UK manufacturers and critical national infrastructure providers, cybersecurity priorities are expanding rapidly from IT into operational technology (OT). The convergence of these environments is now unavoidable as factories, utilities and transport networks digitise their control systems.
Yet many organisations remain constrained by culture and process. Engineering teams are rightly cautious about downtime, while IT and security teams are focused on protection and monitoring. The result is a tension between the need for visibility and the priority for uptime. Bridging that divide will be one of 2026’s defining challenges. And it starts with communication. Strengthening collaboration between IT, security and operational teams, and developing a shared understanding of critical assets and risks, will be essential to protecting performance while ensuring resilience for all stakeholders
4). The new nerve centres of the UK economy
It’s no secret that the UK is experiencing a surge in data centre development driven by the boom in AI and cloud services. Projects acrossLondon, Leeds, Hertfordshire and beyond, backed by major investors such as Google and Microsoft, are reshaping the national digital infrastructure. That expansion is being matched by advances in hardware; NVIDIA’s BlueField-4 “AI factory” architecture highlights how next-generation computing is transforming what these facilities can deliver and the scale of resilience now required to keep them secure.
These facilities are critical to everything from retail analytics to AI model training, but they depend on intricate webs of operational systems such as energy supply, cooling and building management. As these environments scale, the attack surface expands exponentially. A single misconfigured control system can trigger widespread disruption. In 2026, securing both the physical and digital layers of these facilities will become a national priority for UK data centres.
5). Code security moves to the boardroom
The coming year will see code security move from a specialist concern to a mainstream priority. As UK organisations accelerate digital transformation – particularly in sectors such as financial services, retail and logistics – software is becoming the backbone of every business operation. Yet this speed of development is also expanding the attack surface in ways many security teams are only beginning to grasp.
UK enterprises must, therefore, “shift left” by integrating security earlier in the development process through the continuous integration and delivery systems that automatically build, test and deploy software updates (CI/CD pipelines).
What makes this a clear trend for 2026 is the understanding that code-level failures are no longer a domain of developers alone; they now carry operational consequences. When software underpins payments, fulfilment, control systems or connected devices, a vulnerability in the application layer can disrupt entire workflows.
The thread
Across every sector, the pressures may differ, but the direction of travel is the same: operational resilience is the real measure of security. The past year exposed the fragility of complex digital ecosystems. The next will be about building the capability to adapt, recover and continue, no matter the disruption.
True resilience begins with the ability to manage cyber risk exposure. It depends on how well organisations can identify, understand and manage every connected asset within their environment – from the devices running critical systems to the third-party dependencies supporting them. Without that insight, threats go unseen and weaknesses remain hidden until it’s too late. Proactive discovery and continuous management turn that complexity into clarity, giving organisations the ability to anticipate and act before disruption takes hold.
For UK organisations, that’s what 2026 will be remembered for: the year resilience stopped being a goal and became the foundation.
