Networking Technology Trends for 2026

From an IT pro’s perspective, the future of networking technology in 2026 is a mixed bag of potential and security risk. New wireless tech, agentic AI, and the increased distribution of networks are enabling new use cases and helping automate toil, but they also create new attack surfaces and risk profiles. In this article, we’ll take a look at the ten network security trends we’re most excited about in 2026 and provide key insights about what each one means for IT and MSP teams. 

Summary of 2026 trends:

1. Wi-Fi 7 adoption ramps up: With a 55% CAGR through 2030 and more client devices adding Wi-Fi 7 support, it is beginning to exit the early-adopter phase.
2. “Identity-first” security: Identities are becoming the new security perimeter. NHIs and dynamic network perimeters are forcing organizations to rethink where to define security boundaries, with identities replacing network segments as the new security perimeter. 
3. AIOps in network automation drives a shift to predictive IT ops: Artificial intelligence is unlocking new, predictive use cases that weren’t practical with traditional network automation tooling. 
4. Software-Defined Everything (SDx) as the default approach to network design: Technology like SDN, SD-WAN, and SASE provides flexibility and scalability in network deployments and configuration, making them better suited than point security appliances to support modern network and security requirements.
5. Network resilience as a C-level focal point: Executives are recognizing incidents are a matter of “when, not if” and prioritizing resilience, not just prevention.
6. AI traffic increases network bandwidth consumption: The explosion of AI is one of the biggest general computer network security industry trends of 2026, and with it comes a meaningful spike in bandwidth consumption. 
7. MCP servers and agentic workflows create new cybersecurity challenges: Autonomous AI agents create new attack surfaces that cybersecurity teams must account for. 
8. Cybersecurity becomes a core MSP service: Security is the fastest-growing MSP segment and provides an opportunity for providers to deliver value and grow their bottom line. 
9. TLS 1.3 becomes the default approach to encrypting web traffic:  With 88% of the top websites already supporting TLS 1.3 through clear performance and security benefits, it is becoming the preferred choice for encrypting web traffic.  
10. 5G is heading towards universal adoption: With near complete penetration in North America (95%), 5G makes high-throughput wireless connectivity possible in locations where wired broadband is prohibitively difficult to deploy. 

Most impactful network technology trends for 2026

2026 is an exciting time for the future of network security and network technologies. Of course, network trends are typically a mix of buildup, opportunity, and risk. In the sections below, we’ll take a look at 10 networking technology trends from an IT and MSP perspective and provide key insights on how the future of network technology might impact your organization. 

#1: Wi-Fi 7 adoption is ramping up

The Wi-Fi Alliance’s Wi-Fi certification program launched back in January 2024. However, as IT professionals well know, shiny new protocols and standards aren’t rolled out in one big wave. In fact, as we can see from OpenSignal data, even through Q1 2025, Wi-Fi 7 accounted for less than 1% of Wi-Fi connection time across clients.  

Time spent by client devices on different Wi-Fi generations (Source: OpenSignal)

However, usage is likely to increase sharply in the coming years. With the Wi-Fi 7 market having a projected 55% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2030, you can expect to see Wi-Fi 7 network devices become the norm in 2026. 

To be sure, Wi-Fi 7 isn’t just an upgrade for an upgrade’s sake. The improvements in WiFi-7, such as 4096 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (4096-QAM), Multiple Resource Unit (MRU), and Multi-Link Operation (MLO), will allow for better performance and support for high-throughput (e.g., AR/AV) and high-congestion (e.g., events, large facilities, etc.) wireless deployments that weren’t practical in previous Wi-Fi generations. 

While we don’t expect them to overtake Wi-Fi 6 and 6E yet, it makes more sense than ever for new Wi-Fi rollouts to opt for Wi-Fi 7 to help ensure they’re future-proofed in the years to come. 

💡Key insight for IT pros: Wi-Fi 5, 6, and 6E aren’t going away in 2026, but Wi-Fi 7 usage will ramp up. Consider Wi-Fi 7 for new greenfield deployments and upgrades to help future-proof your infrastructure. 

#2: “Identity-first” security: identities are becoming the new security perimeter 

Non-human identities (NHIs) related to API keys, service accounts, bots, and automation scripts have surged in recent years. In fact, a recent report indicates that more than half of surveyed organizations had a machine-to-human identity ratio over 100:1. The span of control for these NHIs can range from very simple testing scripts to highly-privileged accounts that can deploy to large swaths of enterprise production environments. 

Identity-first security helps organizations address threats to NHIs and traditional user accounts by placing identities, rather than a network perimeter, at the center of their security model. This more granular approach to enforcing security policies enables organizations to consistently implement context-aware access control decisions and complements security best practices such as the principle of least privilege (PoLP) and zero-trust network access (ZTNA). 

Of course, any discussion about identities in 2026 that doesn’t include AI agents would be incomplete. With so many organizations ramping up AI adoption and encouraging employees to deploy agents to become more efficient, securing numerous distributed autonomous identities will undoubtedly create challenges for IT security teams.

💡Key insight for IT pros: NHIs and AI agents are on the rise; work with your identity teams to think about access control and identity lifecycle management holistically. 

#3: AIOps in network automation will drive a shift to predictive IT ops

AIOps is one of the most popular network buzzwords as we kick off 2026, and for good reason. Integrating artificial intelligence into network operations can reduce time to respond and resolve, helping IT teams shift from a reactive (responding to an issue after it happens) to a predictive model that focuses on mitigating issues before they escalate into incidents. 

Specific use cases where AIOps can help organizations streamline their IT operations include:

• Early detection of anomalies 
• Filtering out false positive alerts
• Automatic remediation and self-healing
• Predictive maintenance to anticipate issues before they lead to downtime

Just how big of an impact can you expect IT ops to have? 

Dr. Brian Luckey reports that AIOps can reduce operational issues like system downtime by 30% and help resolve IT help desk issues up to 50% faster. However, AI isn’t a panacea. As Rebecca Grassing previously explained, human oversight and full network visibility will remain essential for contextualizing alerts, developing resilient systems, and validating root causes. 

💡Key insight for IT pros: Focus on “AI with humans”, not “AI versus humans,” as you integrate AIOps into your network management workflows. 

#4: Software-Defined Everything (SDx) is becoming the default approach to network design

Over the last decade, we’ve seen software-defined network and cybersecurity technologies like SDN, SD-WAN, and SASE become more and more common in modern networks. With the SDN market projected to increase by over 4x in the next decade, 2026 is a year where SDx will be the norm for many network deployments. 

Part of this shift is driven by network complexity. Hardware-centric network models struggle to keep up with the dynamic nature of hybrid cloud, multicast networking, remote work, and edge computing. SDx is more flexible and offers centralized control. Additionally, the need for policy-driven security to support microsegmentation and identity-based access control is well aligned with the programmatic nature of SDx. 

Fortunately for MSPs and IT pros, SDx comes with a clear upside: repeatability and scale. Once you have your network defined in code, configuration management and deployments across hundreds of environments become significantly more efficient. 

💡Key insight for IT pros: If you’re only beginning to adopt SDx, you may be behind the curve. For many IT teams and MSPs, SDx optimization via automation, observability, and consistent policy enforcement will be a key focus in 2026. 

#5: Network resilience is a C-level focal point

Interest in “network resilience” is clearly one of the latest trends in networking technology, as it saw a hockey stick-style spike in interest in the second half of 2025. Additionally, Fortinet has labeled 2026 “the year of resilience” and indicated many CISOs are already acting as “chief resilience officers” in practice. 

Fundamentally, this newfound emphasis on resilience is a shift from focusing solely on prevention. With the complexities of modern networks, reliance on third-party providers, and increasing threat actor sophistication, it’s simply unreasonable to expect IT and cybersecurity teams to prevent every incident. Instead, organizations need to focus on how they maintain operations even if something goes wrong. 

From a network perspective, that means we can expect to see an increased focus on:

• Network visibility and end-to-end observability as a requirement: Troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and recovery all depend on robust network observability. 
• Architecture that emphasizes redundancy and segmentation: Tacking on resilience after a network is deployed and operational is less robust than building with resilience in mind. 
• Aligning network KPIs with customer and business outcomes: Network leaders should plan around user-focused metrics like uptime, performance, and MTTR, not system-focused metrics like CPU utilization and internal alerts. 
• Response automation when possible: Autoscaling, failover, traffic rerouting, and remediation workflows can all be automated to reduce downtime and make networks more resilient. 

💡Key insight for IT pros: Think about network failures from a “not if, but when?” perspective and design for network resilience. 

#6: AI traffic is significantly increasing network bandwidth consumption

AI workloads are emerging as one of the single largest drivers of network traffic. Organizations that train AI models, build high-volume data pipelines, and provide AI services consume substantial bandwidth. In fact, a recent report indicates that enterprises scaling AI implementations have experienced a 30-50% network traffic increase within two years. 

This increase in traffic means network teams need to rethink capacity planning, network architecture, and performance requirements to ensure they’re ready to support the continuous data-heavy workloads associated with AI projects. For teams that traditionally supported mostly human workloads, this can be a significant shift. 

💡Key insight for IT pros: Understand the network load AI projects will put on your network bandwidth and design your networks and KPIs accordingly. 

#7: MCP servers and agentic workflows are creating new cybersecurity challenges

Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers provide AI agents with native access to tools that enable them to gain additional capabilities and act more autonomously on behalf of users. From a workflow automation perspective, there is a lot of potential here, and many organizations are leaning into the hype and incentivizing employees to automate more using agentic workflows.

From a cybersecurity perspective, this creates a whole new attack surface and introduces risks CISOs didn’t have to think about just a few years ago. A recent SailPoint report summarizes the challenges well. While 98% of organizations intend to expand the use of AI agents, 96% view the same agents as a security threat, and only 54% claim full awareness of the data the agents can access. Further, 80% indicated AI agents have taken actions they were not supposed to, including unauthorized system access (39%) and downloading sensitive content (32%).

As MCP server and AI agent deployments continue to grow in 2026, IT and cybersecurity teams will need to balance the opportunity and business pressure to innovate quickly with risk mitigation and security controls that address these new attack surfaces. 

💡Key insight for IT pros: Ensure AI initiatives include a plan for governance and risk management. 

#8: Cybersecurity is becoming a core MSP service, not just an add-on

Cybersecurity is the fastest-growing MSP service segment, with projected growth of 18% through 2026. For many MSP clients, expectations for identity management, endpoint security, and incident response are now the norm. Additionally, stricter cybersecurity insurance requirements and compliance pressures are incentivizing MSPs to build security services into their service packages.

This creates a clear growth opportunity for MSPs to shift and position cybersecurity as a core component of their value proposition. However, it’s important to understand the opportunity isn’t about selling individual security tools. Rather, security-focused MSPs and Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) must focus on continuously delivering security outcomes for their clients. 

💡Key insight for IT pros: In 2026, the lines between IT MSP and MSSP are blurring. MSPs should review their service offerings and validate that their service offerings are keeping up with market demands. 

#9: TLS 1.3 is becoming the default approach to encrypting web traffic 

TLS 1.3 adoption has been ramping up significantly in recent years, with 88% of the top 1000 websites now supporting TLS 1.3. In the long run, this is an incredibly promising trend from a network and cybersecurity perspective as TLS 1.3 comes with several key benefits over TLS 1.2, including:

• Simplicity: One of the biggest challenges with TLS 1.2 is managing cipher suites. TLS 1.3 uses fewer cipher suites and only includes suites that support Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). Any IT admin who has struggled with OpenSSL commands to disable insecure ciphers should appreciate this change.
• Improved performance: TLS 1.3 also simplifies the TLS handshake with Zero Round-Trip Time (0-RTT) key exchanges that improve network speed.
• Improved security: A few of the security benefits of TLS 1.3 include PFS reducing the risk of man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, the TLS 1.3 handshake encrypting more of the handshake process than TLS 1.2, and the elimination of TLS-level compression, which removes the attack surface that was exploited in vulnerabilities like CRIME/CVE-2012-4929.

Although TLS 1.3 is not inherently post-quantum cryptography (PQC) or quantum secure, it does provide a foundation for future PQC.

While we can expect TLS 1.2 to remain supported for the next few years, especially on older systems and devices, TLS 1.3 is poised to become the default approach for web traffic encryption going forward. 

💡Key insight for IT pros: TLS 1.2 will remain common in 2026 and can be a reasonable balance of security and backwards compatibility. Consider using TLS 1.3 as much as practical to help secure, simplify, and future-proof your networks. 

#10: 5G is heading towards universal adoption 

According to 5G Americas, 2025 saw 99% 5G penetration in the US, 95% across North America, and a 35% year-over-year (YoY) increase in 5G connections to 2.8 billion connections globally. The high throughput and availability of 5G make it a key enabler of IoT connectivity, backup WAN links, and fixed wireless access (FWA) in locations where broadband is otherwise slow or difficult to deploy. In 2026, we expect 5G adoption to continue growing and reshaping network deployments worldwide.

For example, private 5G (which offers dedicated, nonpublic 5G infrastructure) and private 5G as a service continue to grow in popularity, providing organizations with the benefits of 5G access without using public networks. Organizations can use these networks to address use cases where additional security (e.g., requiring a SIM to connect to a network), wireless coverage, or performance are needed, such as with autonomous guided vehicles (AGV), manufacturing, and logistics. 

💡Key insight for IT pros: 5G maturity and private 5G provide IT and MSPs with a networking medium that provides high-throughput cellular connectivity with enterprise-grade control. 

Exploring the future of networking technology

AI, new wireless technologies like 5G and Wi-Fi 7, and new network protocols are shaping the future of networking technology in 2026 and beyond. For network pros, that future comes with opportunities and challenges such as:

• Dynamic and distributed networks will require deep visibility: With networks spanning cloud, edge, private 5G, and on-prem networks, basic uptime monitoring isn’t sufficient. IT needs real-time visibility into traffic patterns, dependencies, and overall network performance to quickly identify issues, quantify impact, maintain reliability across different types of networks, and identify network optimization opportunities. 
• Capacity planning must account for use cases IT hasn’t seen before: For organizations launching AI initiatives in 2026, IT professionals will be tasked with building networks that can support data-intensive workloads. Traditional models based on user counts and historical usage likely won’t apply. IT teams will need to plan for high levels of east-west traffic, bandwidth consumption, and AI-training driven spikes. 
• Demonstration of value will become essential for greenlighting and sustaining projects: AI has a lot of promise, but we’re already seeing concerns about realized value. As the hype dies down, and with CEO revenue confidence hitting a five-year low, business leaders will be looking to validate ROI on IT projects, and those who can’t demonstrate value are likely to get cut. 
• Support models need to shift from reactive to proactive: The emphasis on network resilience will put pressure on IT professionals to ensure minor issues are addressed before users create tickets or large swaths of production go down. 

How Auvik helps you overcome the network visibility, ops, and business challenges of emerging tech 

Auvik is purpose-built to help IT teams and MSPs achieve the network visibility and control required to meet the network challenges of 2026 and beyond. With Auvik, teams can:

• Automatically map networks to ensure engineers always have a clear picture of the current state of devices, dependencies, and data flows.
• Quickly roll back network device configurations to a known “golden config” when performing network troubleshooting, and maintain a detailed change history for auditing and compliance.
• Hit the ground running with 64+ preconfigured alerts to eliminate guesswork, proactively detect problems before your users report them, and troubleshoot faster when it counts.
• Demonstrate business value and derive insights from detailed network reports designed to address use cases ranging from network performance to quarterly business reviews (QBRs).

Keep your networks secure in 2026 & beyond with Auvik

Auvik has been helping IT and MSP teams solve complex network problems since 2011. With an emphasis on simplicity and proactively enabling network automation, the cloud-based Auvik Network Management (ANM) platform can help organizations solve the network management challenges of 2026. For example, Auvik’s network capacity planning capabilities help teams overcome the limitations of point-in-time capacity snapshots and make informed decisions about justifying infrastructure investments. 

If you’d like to see what Auvik Network Management (ANM) can do firsthand, sign up for a free (no credit card required) 14-day trial today. Typical deployments can have ANM deployed, running, and demonstrating value in less than an hour!