Name: 2026 Predictions: The Cyber Resilience Imperative and What to Expect
Uploaded: 2026-01-13T18:16:04.699Z
Duration: 1 h 12 s
Description: 2026 Predictions: The Cyber Resilience Imperative and What to Expect

Transcript for "2026 Predictions: The Cyber Resilience Imperative and What to Expect": Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Justin Rees. I'm the director of product marketing here at Rubrik. Super excited to share with you our key insights or thoughts on the 2026 kind of outlook and take you through some key predictions that we are seeing unfold in the market. Can't believe 2025 is already coming to an end. Went by fast, lots happened, lots of operational kind of outages, new new cyber threats kind of hitting the fold, lots talk around cloud and AI. And so excited just to share kind of what our outlook is for 2026. And so before we get into the predictions, just really excited to introduce a couple of our guest speakers who will be joining us today. Unfortunately, one of which won't be able to join us. He fell sick due to some of our kind of recent business trips and travel. So we wish him well. Hopefully, we can do it again. But with that, really excited to get the opportunity to speak with Steven Foskett. He's the president of Tech Field Day at the Future Room Group. Most of you probably know him, so I for one have been really excited to get the chance to meet with you, Steven, and just learn from you. And so love to have you say a couple words, introduce yourself, background, expertise. Sure. Thanks having me on here. I've been familiar with Rubrik for many, many years, but I've been involved in storage and backup even longer. I basically focused on storage and data protection from the 1990s onward. Wrote a book on storage, presented on the topic throughout the years, and of course, storage and backup are so closely related. I started TechField Day, as you mentioned, in 2009. And one of the companies that presented early on was a little startup called Rubrik. And so it's been thrilling to watch the company grow its focus, grow its product, and grow its capabilities to protect data. So this is a topic that's really dear to my heart, and I really hope that folks are able to pick up some useful information from it. Awesome. Well, thank you again so much for being here and really look forward to your insights on some of these predictions that we're making for the next year. And so with that, for the rest of the kind of format, we'll take you through five key predictions that we have for 2026. We'll kind of talk a little bit about them, and then and then we'll have an open conversation on those topics. So with that, what is the first prediction? And so the first prediction we have is probably more in line with what you would think about from a traditional data protection perspective. And so we're predicting that this will be the year that, you know, the term backup, as a concept, will kind of fall to the wayside. And so the reason for that is, I think we're at this kind of focal point of backups in their use case and what they're used for and and and and kind of the the key use case has changed. And we're going much more towards an an an assume breach kind of mentality. And the reason for that is, how do we deliver the fastest Cyber RTO for customers? And so I think this will be the year that we kind of start seeing a shift in the market of organizations that view backup and recovery as a kind of tool, hopefully we don't have to use, it's on the back foot. It's kind of a more of a after the fact sort of thing, versus companies that are leaning into the cyber resilience story within Zoom breach, and kind of leaning into the preemptive recovery side of things, using it to improve posture, ensure your fast side for RTO. And so interested, Steven, your side, as you mentioned, lots of background and experience in backup and storage and IT kind of overall. What's your thought? Does this feel like just a rebrand? Does this feel like kind of a marketing buzzword or from a concept perspective? What's your thoughts? Yeah. I am a 100% on board with this. Backup was never a good term for what we're trying to do here. It's always been about recovery. And yet, for some reason, we called it backup. And I think that that had to do with a legacy mindset and sort of a backward looking technology looking focus. Essentially, the mechanism by which we enabled recovery was to back up data. And typically that meant, as you said, copying it to another location, for example, from disc to tape. And that whole mindset made sense when that was all you could do technologically. But even as early as the 2000s, we were hearing companies say that that's really not the right approach. Some of my compatriots over at magazines like Storage Magazine and events that I was speaking at, were already talking about this shift from backup to recovery twenty years ago or more. And now I think that it's just absolutely solidified. It's as obsolete as the floppy disk icon that you use to save your document in applications. You know, when was the last time you saw floppy disk? Well, when was the last time a, you know, a company relied solely on sort of a daily batch job to dunk all their data to tape and hope that it worked for data protection. It just isn't the way it has been for years and it isn't what people need. Because the bottom line is that nobody needs backup. Everybody needs recovery. Everybody needs the ability to go back in time and find that file before it was changed, find this data set before the ransomware attackers got into it, recover this data store before the system fell over, burned down, and sunk into the swamp. And I think that that's really what people are after. The idea as well of preemptive recovery is really, really smart because we wanna make sure that we have a handle on the data before the time comes. Because when the time comes, that's the last time you wanna be worried about, wait, wait, what do I need? What does my data look like? You really need to be ready for that, so that when you need to recover, you're able to recover. Yeah, it's been an interesting conversation because I think Rubrik has talked about the convergence of IT and security for some time. And I think now it's going beyond just teams working together, it's actually showing up in the tools. And so hopefully this will kind of accelerate it. Curious, you had mentioned that this is a topic that's kind of been around the industry of kind of progressing from just data protection to being able to recover. What do you think over the last couple of years and going into 2026 has been kind of the focal point or like that pushing over of like, hey, this is now here, right? It's been a concept, it's been an idea, but at least since I've been at Rubrik for the last six years, it really does seem like the next few years, like this is gonna be something that is achievable. And so kinda curious, like what makes this next year the year that you'll see most of this happen? Well, the rise of ransomware has given businesses more of a focus. I would say that knowing data protection and storage professionals back in the day, they were always frustrated because they wanted to do better. They wanted to serve the business better. They wanted to deploy better capabilities. But the challenge was, how do I translate my understanding of the technology and my understanding of its limitations into a way to get the business on board? Well, you know, ransomware has been really bad for companies, but it has also been an opportunity for data protection, IT professionals to finally get a seat at that table and say, you know, we have a capability that can improve our resilience. We have a capability, and in the face of ransomware, we have a capability that can fundamentally improve the company's ability to survive as a firm, to stay in business. And when you are able to provide that level of capability to your organization, suddenly resources open up, but more importantly, interest opens up. And the opportunity opens up to find a product, to find a capability that gives you better resilience. And I think that that's really what we're seeing. You also mentioned the the com this crossover between, from from it's like an arc from data protection to recovery to resilience to security. And there's so much you know, data protection and data resilience are so connected to security that it almost isn't an IT infrastructure storage capability at all. It almost is an IT information security capability. And I think that another thing that I've seen, you know, putting on an analyst hat here, is that companies that are able to provide solutions that support security are able to and and and able to talk to security pros, are able to succeed and are transforming their business in a way that companies that are still focused on the old storage backup recovery regime are just not able to do. And I'll say too finally, that that was visible even at the very start of Rubrik. You know, the first time I talked to Rubrik was kind of 2015, I think, which is about ten years ago. Right from the very start, it was clear that this was a group that was trying to reinvent data protection with a focus on resilience and recovery, not trying to basically roll out a new technical capability, a new technology. Right. Yeah, absolutely. I think good segue maybe the next prediction, but one of the talking points that we run into with some folks is, you know, we hear from IT that, hey, security is not my job. An interesting part to that is, you know, yeah, we would agree. However, to your point, being able to recover your business, that's probably something that you have a huge hand in. And so, yes, Rubrik does have security capabilities, but a lot of these tools just help provide the visibility to help streamline the recovery, to ensure kind of business continuity. So I think that's been the shift of most of the conversations that we've had is how do we speak to customers and to folks in the market practitioners that who have this perception that this is a security thing that's not really in their domain, when in reality, these things just help accelerate their capabilities to help them restore. And so you mentioned that there's really a lot of close alignment between data protection and cyber resilience. And so this next one actually, I think talks to that more. So we talked about data protection. This next prediction is on the cyber recovery side. And so that we're gonna see this great consolidation of all these security tools into one unified kind of resilience platform. And if we look at, you know, kind of the Rubrik Security Cloud platform as an example, there's data threat analytics, there's the identity capabilities, there's data classification. And so all of these like tools that have been disparate are now under one hood. And I think we're gonna continue to see that trend into 2026. And so what is the benefit of this? I think it's all in the spirit of delivering the fastest Cyber RTO. And so can you think of some examples of how like tool fragmentation to date has actually slowed down the recovery during some kind of a cyber threat? Yeah. Haven't happily haven't been on the other end of the table when a cyber attack happened, But I do I am sensitive to that because I have been on the other end, trying to help a business restore after a environmental disaster, a storm, at one of the companies that I worked for. And the challenge at that point was exactly what you what you said. Essentially, all of the information that we needed, all of the, data that we needed, all of the people that we needed to bring together, we had never brought that together in a practical way. And so even though we had the data, even though we had maps of applications and storage, even though we had an org chart and knew who we should talk to, we weren't really sure that that would all work because all of these things had been created and and and and maintained entirely separately in a siloed way. And so when the time came to do an actual honest recovery, the first step was, I guess panic. Because we had to go find all this information, assuming that we had it. Luckily we did in that case, but many people maybe they don't. Maybe they don't have a good understanding of their data or the locations of the data. Maybe they don't know who it is that's supposed to be able to recover this application or that database. Especially in modern times where companies have cloud infrastructure, where companies are using as a service applications, they may have very little understanding of what is needed when the time comes. So this idea that a company or a platform could integrate all of this is really helpful on the face of it. Also, what became clear throughout the last ten years or so, is that data protection products have access to a lot of information that can be valuable when the time comes to recover. And so what we've seen is companies increasingly able to classify and categorize data and understand, know, really bring an understanding of that to the fore, so that when the time comes, we know that we will be able to recover because it's all kind of consolidated. And so the thing that I've been most excited about watching in the last ten years in terms of resilience and data protection companies, is companies that are increasing the footprint that have, you know, and it started with things like native database backups and recovery. But then it went into things like SaaS applications and more, you know, different kinds of platforms, you know, Docker first, then Kubernetes and VMware and so on. And all of these capabilities coming together in a single platform gives me a lot more confidence that when the time comes, we will be able to actually recover and not panic. Right. And so interestingly, I think from an IT perspective, like there has been this concerted effort to continually consolidate the number of IT tools, right, that companies use. I think that's been a recurring theme for ten years plus. But also there's this idea of like best of breed kind of solutions and kind of buying these very best of breed type of capabilities. So interested to get your take on like, how does 2026 become the inflection point for this? And how do you see that kind of like the balance between consolidation, but best of breed, and how does that show up in the data protection in the cyber resilience space? Yeah, well, know, best of breed is in the eye of the beholder. I would say that the most important thing that people have to do, is find a solution that is best of breed for them. Find a solution that matches all of their requirements. And some of those are gonna be technical requirements. I mean, one of the most obvious is make sure that it supports all of the main types of data, and applications, and locations, and modalities of application management and operation that you have. But also, you know, make sure that it's something that is going to be supportable and be maintainable and grow with you. And all of those types of things, because that's gonna give you more confidence. And again, it really is all about confidence. When that day happens, you need to be confident that you're going to be able to recover. Right. From a, I guess flip side of the coin, consolidation great for things like efficiency and operations and those types of things. But from a risk perspective, do you see any risk in having like a unified platform? Does that present like a single point of failure for some of this? I'm just trying to think through this and kind of steel man the conversation of like, does this present some kind of problem for the market? Just having a single solution for this, or what's your take on that? Yeah, well, it's always a concern. If you're reliant on a single company, and we have seen this in IT. I don't need to name names, but I mean, I think everybody has seen this repeatedly in the history of IT. Every few years, a company rises to become the ne plus ultra of IT and then they aren't anymore. And suddenly you find yourself trying to figure out how am I going to live without that solution. I do worry about single points of failure, but happily, when it comes to resilience and data protection. Well, number one, it's not going to interrupt day to day operations if something should happen to your data protection environment. Now it's not good, but you know, I mean, if something happens and it's not a ransomware attack, it's not a Doctor scenario, well, we can probably roll right over at. Another thing to think about is sort of the flip side of this is that if you're trying to not have all your eggs in one basket, sometimes you end up having risks of carrying multiple baskets. And we are hearing that. I was actually speaking with a number of financial industry CTOs this week, and the conversation there was about multi cloud and whether multi cloud was worth more or less than having a single cloud provider. And most of them felt a little more ambivalent about this question than you might think because frankly, having multiple providers for key infrastructure components makes everything harder. Whereas having somebody that you can partner with that will provide everything for you, makes everything easier in terms of operations. Now, again, there are risks to this. I think when it comes to data protection, I would be hard pressed to decide that it would be more appropriate to have multiple solutions than one solution, simply because I think that the benefits of having a single unified data protection environment would outweigh the risks. Yeah. So just to kind of keep going on that thread, what do you think about the idea, like, reduce that risk of a unified platform and being a platform of platforms, like, being able to tie into different ecosystems, whether it like these data protection solutions and cyber resilience solutions are sending data out to other tools, to other security tools. Do you think that makes things more complicated? Do you think that helps reduce that risk? Is that a required capability or do you think that doesn't really help anything? No, I really like the idea of integrating with third party tools. Again, if I can be a little bit operational about it, I think that having your data protection solution integrate with your cybersecurity platforms, having it integrate with your operational platforms, even financial platforms, would help to bring those people to the table and help to expose the capabilities that you have in the platform. It would also reduce the duplication. So like I said, with data protection systems, a lot of the time there's some data identification, data classification capabilities that can be used. Those are also duplicated in many other systems. And I hear, you know, cybersecurity companies coming out with solutions that may be better handled by the data protection system and vice versa. And so I think that having, know, the more integration you can have, the more visibility you can have, the better it's gonna be organizationally and operationally to put these things into practice and to have them be of use to the company when that day comes. I think the idea of being able to leverage a platform to not only enrich partner data, being able to send things out like SIEM and SOAR, but also to enrich our own data thread analytics and scanning to find, you know, these areas of compromise for companies as well as something that we're seeing as well. But with that, moving on to the identity, I think this one has been a really interesting paradigm shift of, know, more and more we're hearing that attackers aren't hacking in or breaking in, that they're being able to log in, right? And so this idea that identity is really becoming a crux of any cyber resilience conversation. And so a prediction for 2026 is that we're going to continue to see that trend increase. There's gonna be more focus on identity infrastructure, as that becomes more kind of critical than data infrastructure. And so curious on your thoughts on the importance of identity and maybe how that maybe has changed, if at all, over the last couple of years. This is actually a really exciting new area. And you're right, it is really the last couple of years that we've seen identity security rise in prominence as an area of data protection. Because I think that most people didn't think of identity systems as data that needed protection so much as as applications that needed management. And yet, if you look at your active directory system, it is data. It's data just like your HR file system or your engineering drawings. It it is corporate data. And not only that, but we've seen companies starting to approach it from that perspective, from that data protection perspective and saying, what if we could capture that data? What if we could store that data? What if we could roll that data back? What if we could really integrate with an identity management system, like we could integrate with a file server or an Oracle database server or, you know, any of these other things that we are already protecting? That's a new area. That's an exciting area. And I think that it is, in line as well, like you said, with the current threats that we're seeing. Because it became clear pretty quick that identity management can lock people out of a system just as effectively as encryption can. And if you can block somebody's access, then they they the data might as well not be there. And conversely, identity is the easiest exploit in many cases, in terms of trying to get into a corporation systems. And it's the easiest way to move laterally within a corporation. So essentially, if I can compromise this identity, then I can add myself to that group, then I can move over here and get myself into this other group, then I can get access to this other system. It becomes, you know, one of the primary vehicles. And that is certainly something that we saw on the cybersecurity front in the last couple of years. But yet cybersecurity companies haven't been as able to answer that question, because frankly, they hadn't thought of it in terms of data. Whereas a lot of, I think the traditional backup companies looked at that and said, wait a second, we could treat that as data. So I think this is a very exciting thing. I also think that this is gonna be growing in prominence. I'm hearing the same story from multiple companies, both inside the data protection space, but also on the security space. I think this is gonna be a big trend in '26. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think there's always two things that come up in conversations with folks about this too is, you know, previously we would back up and recover things like M365. And it'd be great. You could protect and secure all of my M365 data, but now I need to recover it. But the identity part was compromised as well. Now nobody can access that. And so being able to deliver these companies, both not just the data protection, but then the identity protection as well, it kinda drives the outcome of, well, now you can get your company operational again. Right? To your point, great. I have all the data, but now I can't access it. Second, I think there's always this like wow factor of backing up and recovering identity is super complex. And I think lots of folks are very surprised of, you know, hey, you you have a kind of seamless workflow to do all of this. I think it's something that people aren't just really aware of quite yet. And so I think we'll continue to see that unfold in 2026 as well. Wouldn't be a 2026 predictions. We didn't talk about authentic kind of AI. And so this idea is, you can't really talk to any company on the planet now without talking about how they're gonna leverage these AI tools in the future. But in that same breath, I think the biggest question is always, well, yes, we know that there's a lots of robust capabilities. We don't really know how to roll these out quite yet. Lots of concerns around trust. What do we have? What are they doing? Those questions still seem to be kind of hard to solve. And so we're gonna see a lot of focus in 2026 on how do we take all this great capabilities that are available, but how do we roll them out in a safe fashion where these AI agents really don't do harm? Interested in your thoughts on this. I can have lots of conversations and buzz around the kind of AI, lots of projects in the pilot stage. I think very few move to production. And so kind of curious to get your thoughts on this. Yeah. The AI world is moving so incredibly fast. If you're listening to this and being like, oh gosh, I don't know how to handle this yet. You're not alone. Talk to your peers in the industry and you'll find that everybody is feeling the same. Clearly, these tools are coming. It reminds me of the early eighties. I was not yet part of the IT industry. I was a kid. But back in the day, PCs came into the industry because people wanted to use them. And so they went and they bought one and they got, VisiCalc or Lotus one, two, three or whatever. And they put it on their desk and they started using it and it became an integral part of the company. AI is coming in that way. It is being used by people all over the organization. AI agents as well. Again, I was talking to some of these CTOs and they're saying that they feel like bring your own agent is a real thing. And this is real pending trouble for IT folks who are trying to enable resilience. Because think of it this way. Just like in those days when the most valuable data was on the salesman's desktop PC or or the HR rep's laptop. It's impossible to protect and recover that data because it's just not part of the world. And and that same thing is happening with AI and especially with AgenTic AI. Because if I'm a person who has an AI based workflow, and I'm using a company like Google or OpenAI to run that workflow. And if I'm sending my data there, none of that is within the vision or the purview of IT. And how is IT possibly going to be able to capture that data and protect it? And then in the event of an outage, in the event of a problem, how are they going to possibly bring that world back? They just can't. And so I think that it's important for IT folks to, well, first recognize that this is all brand new, but also to offer useful and effective and approved solutions that are within the control of the company in order to hopefully head off this problem instead of, you know, letting it become this whole world of sort of dark AI implementation. Right. I think the word trust really comes up quite a bit. Right? Like, hey, we have to be able to trust these solutions and what they're doing. From a controls perspective, and operations perspective, you know, what does the word trust mean to you in this context? And like, how do these organizations need to be thinking through how to roll these out? Yeah. Well, it really does come down to trust. And I would say that the difference between trust and security is security is what you do, and trust is how you feel. And truly, none of us trust these systems, because we've seen, we've heard too many stories, you know? And we've seen too many problems. And frankly, these systems aren't yet trustworthy, because they're brand new. You know? It's not like they've proven themselves. It's not like they've had an opportunity to be deployed and to have people study how they're working. These are cutting edge things. You know, as we're recording this, you know, OpenAI just went from ChatGPT five one to five two. I don't know if you heard about that. Maybe not even yet, but it's here. Guess what? And we don't even know really what's in there. And we don't even know how that's working. And it's the same with a lot of these AgenTix solutions. They're coming so quickly that we have to, guess, wait to see what they're going be able to do and whether we can trust them. I do think that in my opinion, would, if I was a CIO or CTO, I would be looking for solutions from major companies with a history of security and a security first mentality. That's why I think some of the biggest names in the industry are going to end up dominating this space on the enterprise side, simply because they can help people trust, as you said, that they're going to be able to integrate these into the overall corporate structure. As opposed to some of the more fast and loose startups, who I think that executives are going to have trouble trusting those. Just like right now, I think you and me, who are out there doing the work, we have trouble trusting them too. Right. Well, I think that's the answer to one of the questions that we probably get most. So Rubrik has rolled out a tool specifically to address this. And the one question that we always get is, well, how does AI play into the cyber resilience play? Right? Like, oh, you're a cyber resilience platform, so what does AgenTeq have to do necessarily with what you're doing? And so I always thought that was an interesting question, because I think cyber resilience and data protection is probably the best positioned, in some ways, to provide that trust, right, to help ensure that organizations feel comfortable, that they're confident that there's a way to rewind if something goes wrong. And so curious, you know, your thoughts on on that conversation around if somebody were to ask, hey, what's a cyber resilience company doing in the in the agentic AI space? How would you respond to that? Well, if I had to respond to that, I would be like, of course, we're here. I mean, you know, it's it's have you looked at the calendar? Yes. Of course, we're here. But also, just these things are growing in use so rapidly that it would it would be, I don't wanna say criminal, but it would be almost negligent if a company that partnered with companies on resilience wasn't part of the conversation when it came to AgenTik AI. Because next year or the year after, there will be no resilience if you cannot protect, roll back, roll forward AgenTic AI agents and AgenTic the data that they're using. And I think that that's going to be just so absolutely critical. Any company that's not trying to be part of that conversation and to get involved is really doing their customers a disservice. Right. And in some ways, I think data protection and cyber resilience solutions are in the best position to actually help with this problem. Because we, to your point, we're already protecting key environments, we know what's happening, because we have the insights into what's changed in the data that we're protecting, in some ways, I think, like I said, I think we're the best kind of suited to help with this. So definitely a trend that we'll continue to see unfold in 2026. And so this takes us to the last key prediction for 2026. And this actually touches on one of the topics that you had mentioned, and one of the other conversations, I guess, you had this week with some folks, is that this idea of multi cloud and the need for unification. And so in this context, it's more on the data protection side, right? We hear a lot of times from customers of, oh, well, you know, cyber resilience makes sense. We understand the story and kind of the value prop there, but we don't really need it in the cloud because we have things like replication. And so we always think that's interesting conversation because yes, there's replication, but then all of those key concerns around what if somebody gets into your cloud account? Right? You need to have air gaping. You need to make sure that your data is always kind of in a separate place secure, but then on top of that, having those key insights like anomaly detection, what's been compromised, what sensitive data do I have? And so interested to hear your thoughts on this cloud story. Maybe keep pulling on that thread of some of the conversations that you had this week with those folks. Yeah. And I think that there's certainly big reconsideration of cloud and multi cloud especially happening. It's not that people are pulling back from cloud. It's that they're pulling cloud more on prem and into their own, you know, they're just just trying to build their own schema around how are we going to do this. First off, when it comes to data protection, I think it's important to recognize that SaaS providers generally, and I don't wanna say universally, but generally do not provide data protection services, full stop. Replication is not data protection. Replication is high availability. And of course, as we've seen with availability zone outages recently, it doesn't even necessarily mean that because it's just like a ransomware attack. If you can't get to your data, what does it matter that the data is replicated somewhere else? You're still out of luck. But again, try to roll back in the event of an outage. Maybe there is some capability to take snapshots or to store or to roll back. If that's not integrated into a management system, it might as well not exist. To say that because my object store allows me to roll back to previous iterations of my bucket, I'm protected. It is the equivalent of saying I plugged a tape drive into my storage array and I'm dumping stuff to it, so I'm protected. Yet, theoretically you are, but when the day comes, you're gonna be in a lot of pain trying to recover that system. Data protection is only partially about moving data and storing data. It's mostly about the operations involved with management, with organization and with especially, you know, recovery. That's the key. And when it comes to cloud systems, it's the same thing. If if you have two cloud providers giving you database services or storing, you know, object storage or, you know, AI applications. If each of those systems has a completely different system of data protection or snapshotting or whatever, that's gonna be a real pain when the time comes. So if you are focused on multi cloud, I can understand why that would be. It becomes even more important to have a system that can organize and manage that data protection for you, than if you are not multi cloud or if you have your own cloud, your own modern infrastructure that you're using. Right. And I think the one thing that really stood out to me about this prediction is the focus on the recovery speed and not cost. Right? And I think that's saying something when lots of conversations around cloud involve cost and cost sensitivity. And so I think the focus on speed, the seamless ease of use, become really important, especially if you're being able to manage these systems at scale. So definitely one area that is continuing to grow, and we'll see more unfold next year. So these are all of the predictions that we had for 2026. We covered everything from data protection, cyber recovery, identity on the AI side, as well as the verdict mandate in the cloud. And so before we close out, I'd just be curious, of these five predictions, do you think any of these will fall off? Like, which one do you think is gonna be the one to focus on? I'm curious if there's any one in particular that really stands out to you as an area to focus on. Well, the thing that I'm most excited about in terms of real impact to the business is the identity security area. Simply because I think it's a new area. And I think that it's very practical to assume that companies that apply themselves can solve that problem for their customers in short order. I think that that's something that that's basically it's a need that can be solved in '25 and '26. And I think that that will be solved. And I just can't wait to see what the product is that does that. And I can't wait to see that capability rolled out. The other thing that I'm gonna be keeping a very close eye on, as we talked about, is the AgenTic AI world. Companies have to be flexible and realistic about how they're going to use AI, how they're gonna control access to data, how they're gonna protect data. And so I don't think that's gonna be solved in 2026. But I think that any company who is trying to claim to protect data and to provide resilience has to be part of the solution in 2026, so that they can solve it in the future. And so I'm gonna be watching that very closely. Absolutely. Are there things that aren't on this list that should be in your mind? Are there things that are being left out that folks need to be thinking about? I think the biggest thing is the organizational question. One of the things that one of the CTOs of a major bank said to me this week was, for many technical problems, the answer is no longer technical capability. It's not even money. It is organizational acceptability. It is, can we really do this? Can we really provide this capability? And will it really be used? Because, you know, look at AI. There certainly is some capability there. You know, AgenTic AI is on the rise, but generative AI, you know, you look at chat and and what generative AI can do to transform data and to enable people to accomplish tasks quicker, there certainly is technical capability there. But what there isn't yet is that real sense of how do we how do we put this tool in the tool belt instead of just having it sitting on the table and looking at it and playing with it? Like, how do we really make this something practical for us? And that's really what I'm looking at when it comes to any of these technologies. How can we take this from a capability, a technical capability to a real part of our process? And so ultimately, think the thing that's going to spell success or failure for any kind of data protection, data recovery, business continuity, or really any other kind of technical tool is how can we make this something that sort of fades into the background as part of our way of doing things as opposed to a new and shiny tool. Right. Yeah. That's a really interesting point. We do get asked questions around process. And so much so, I think that one of the predictions that we were talking about or kind of touched on a little bit is lots of companies focused on the outcomes when it comes to data protection and cyber in the cyber resilience space. So much so that it seems like there's an uptick in kind of the services that are wrapped around data protection. Right? Like lots of capabilities, but hey, if we can keep moving up the stack where it's, we're really just delivering the outcome, and people don't even have to manage the tool, that seems to be something that comes up more and more with customers of, hey, do you have services that we can kind of get to? Because the meantime to recovery is really what's kind of top of mind. And so I just think that's really been an interesting conversation. So thank you so much, Steven, for being Yeah. Here with us Go go ahead, Steven. What you're selling is success. You're not selling data protection. You're selling recovery success. If you can provide that, then your customers will love you. Is there any final remarks here, thoughts? We're at the end of time here. I just wanted to thank you so much for being here with us. I know I learned a lot. Super insightful. Is there any final things you'd like to leave for the folks on the call? Well, I will just say thank you very much for involving me in this. It is a lot of fun to be able to engage in this sort of end of year predictions. We've been doing this on my utilizing AI podcast. We've been doing this on the TechFieldA podcast. And of course, I would encourage folks to check out Tech Field Day in the Futurum group, where we talk about stuff like this all the time. That's awesome. Well, thank you again for being here with us. Great conversation. For folks on the line, thank you for being here. If you wanted to learn more, please go to rubric.com or feel free to reach out to your Rubrik account team. We'd love to talk to you more about all of these topics in the future of data protection. And with that, that's all the projections that we have for 2026. Thank you so much for all being here with us today. We're gonna keep the conversation going. So please come check out the Data Recovery Summit we have on January 21, where Stephen Foskett will be one of our key guests to keep the conversation going. So don't miss the event. We hope to see you there. We'll talk to you soon.