SIEM & Security Operations in 2026

The latest 2026 Security Operations Insights report paints a very clear picture:

➡️ Security environments are becoming more complex.

➡️ Tool stacks are growing.

➡️ Budgets are strained.

➡️ And confidence in existing SIEM platforms is far from universal.

Cloud & Hybrid

Most surveyed organizations operate in hybrid or multi-cloud environments:

➡️ 48% use a cloud and on-prem mix,

➡️ 37% operate in multi-cloud environments.

Photo: Freepik

Cloud adoption is the primary driver (75%) for modernizing security and cloud operations tooling. Application complexity (56%), governance and compliance requirements (54%), and DevOps acceleration (51%) are also key factors.

This confirms something many of us see in practice:

➡️ modern application environments outpace legacy hasztag#security tooling.

Yet despite these changes, only 37% of security leaders strongly agree that their security tooling is truly designed for modern application environments.

SIEM

While 92% say their SIEM is effective in reducing mean time to detect and respond, only 51% say it is very effective.

Similarly:

➡️ 52% are very confident their SIEM can scale for future needs .

Tool

➡️ 93% of organizations use at least three security operations tools,

➡️ 45% use six or more,

➡️ 55% say they struggle with too many point solutions.

The biggest pain point:

➡️  Operational cost (63%).

This confirms a pattern:

Organizations add tools to close visibility gaps, but tool proliferation increases complexity, noise, integration challenges, and cost.

In highly distributed cloud and hybrid environments, fragmented telemetry leads to blind spots.

AI

➡️ 96% of respondents report adopting AI in some form.

➡️ 90% say AI/ML is valuable in reducing alert fatigue and improving detection accuracy .

However, usage remains relatively basic:

➡️ 49% use AI for threat detection,

➡️ 20% for automated response,

➡️ 17% for anomaly detection,

➡️ only 9% for incident triage.

Lean Security Teams

Less than half (48%) believe their tooling supports lean security teams “very well” .

At the same time:

➡️ 87% agree that unified security and monitoring tooling would improve team efficiency.

➡️ 100% say a unified platform for logs, metrics, and traces would be valuable.

In today’s world of increasingly complex IT environments,especially in larger organizations and cloud-native service providers, failing to invest in event aggregation and analysis systems (SIEM / unified SOC platforms) is a long-term strategic mistake.

Without:

➡️ centralized telemetry,

➡️ correlation across identity, cloud, application, and infrastructure logs,

➡️ real-time detection and analytics,

➡️ organizations are effectively operating blind.

Author: Sebastian Burgemejster