Ivanti releases 2026 state of cybersecurity report

Ivanti released the 2026 State of Cybersecurity Report, drawing on responses from more than 1,200 cybersecurity professionals worldwide, and reported a widening gap between escalating cyberthreats and organizations' capacity to defend against them.

The report said Artificial Intelligence (AI) was reshaping defensive and offensive activity and noted a need to operationalize AI and automation; 92% of respondents said automation reduced their team's mean time to respond. The research found 87% listed integrating agentic AI as a priority and 77% reported at least some comfort allowing autonomous systems to act without human review.

The report defined agentic AI as autonomous systems capable of making real-time decisions and acting independently and detailed current AI use across security functions: 53% for cloud security policy enforcement, 44% for incident response workflows, 43% for threat intelligence correlation, and 42% for vulnerability response and remediation.

Ivanti drew its findings from more than 1,200 cybersecurity professionals worldwide and reported that 48% said IT teams did not respond urgently while 40% said IT lacked understanding of organizational risk tolerance. The research also found 60% used Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and 51% used a cybersecurity exposure score or risk-based index.

“Security leaders understand that time and people are their most valuable assets. Currently, AI tools are effective at automatically handling cyber hygiene tasks that can bog down IT teams and helping close some of the most common gaps in an organizations' defense,” said Daniel Spicer, Chief Security Officer at Ivanti.

The report found respondents were 2.4x more likely to believe defenders used AI as effectively as threat actors, and that ratio rose to 5.5x when respondents considered the next 24 months.