*By Jose Roberto Rodrigues
With the arrival of 2026, digital transformation definitively enters its strategic phase. The debate no longer revolves around whether or not to adopt the cloud, but on how to structure environments capable of supporting growth, innovation, and compliance in an increasingly regulated and distributed landscape. Multicloud, digital sovereignty, and compliance cease to be emerging trends and become the core of corporate decisions for the coming years.
This movement is directly reflected in architectural choices. Gartner predicts that 90% of organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud approach by 2027, signaling a clear shift in mindset: the single cloud no longer meets the demands of performance, security, regulation, and business continuity on its own. Looking ahead to 2026, this data makes it clear that flexibility has ceased to be a differentiator and has become a basic requirement.
The adoption of hybrid and multicloud environments, however, increases the complexity of information governance. Data protection laws, digital sovereignty requirements, and industry standards make data location as strategic as its availability. In this context, deciding where information resides becomes a choice of risk, compliance, and reputation, and not just cost or performance.
The challenge intensifies when this architecture encounters the reality of cyber threats. According to the Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2025, 691 T³ of organizations that were victims of ransomware believed they were prepared before the attack, but reported that their confidence level dropped by more than 201 T³ after the incident. This data reveals a sensitive point for the near future: many strategies fail not due to a lack of technology, but due to excessive reliance on structures that were not designed for hybrid, distributed, and highly regulated environments.
By 2026, this combination of data dispersion, regulatory pressure, and increasingly sophisticated attacks demands a change in approach. Security, digital sovereignty, and compliance can no longer be treated as layers added at the end of projects. They need to be born alongside the architecture, guiding decisions from initial design to ongoing operation.
Looking ahead, the new data race will not be won by those who adopt the most platforms or accelerate migrations, but by those who know how to orchestrate hybrid and multicloud environments with governance, regulatory clarity, and a focus on resilience. Compliance will cease to be an obstacle and will begin to indicate digital maturity. And digital sovereignty will be less and less rhetoric and more and more a technical decision criterion.
In a world where data resides across multiple clouds, systems, and legal boundaries, leading in 2026 will mean transforming complexity into strategy before it becomes risk.
*José Roberto Rodrigues is the country manager and Alliances Manager for Latin America at Adistec Brazil.
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
