With each quarterly edition, CloudFest’s State of the Cloud Report interrogates the shifts in sentiment and strategy among Cloud and internet infrastructure professionals globally, and differentiate true trends from the noise. This is the story behind the story of the Cloud, and that story has some exciting twists and turns.
Four waves in, this series has enough history to show us not just where the industry stands, but where it’s sometimes reversing course. When we look at this season’s pulse against the Spring edition, what started as an impression has now become a solid observation.
The Summer 2026 edition finds a Cloud industry where AI adoption keeps climbing, strategic focus is fading, and security anxiety has become the one constant everyone agrees on.
AI’s steady climb resumes
AI had appeared to plateau as a priority at the start of the year. Not anymore.
Almost 60% of respondents now name AI their most important business priority, up sharply from 45% in September 2025. Whatever pause the industry took earlier this year, it’s over. Perhaps it was a “hydration break”.
Strategy loses ground
If Spring brought signs that the AI race was maturing into more considered, strategic implementation, Summer undoes them—or at least makes us consider the strategic/tactical relationship in a different way.
Business strategy fell as a priority from 36% to 29%. DevOps, meanwhile, has flatlined at just 10%. Adoption, it seems, is outpacing the thinking behind it. Will this be the battle of the cliches: “Move fast, break things” vs. perhaps “Not seeing the forest for the trees”?
One number moves in lockstep, every time
If AI adoption is the industry’s accelerator, AI-related security risk is its constant shadow.
Concern over AI security vulnerabilities has risen from 57% in September to 76% in June, the only metric in the report to move in the same direction in every single wave. Notably, this anxiety doesn’t split along adoption lines: AI enthusiasts and robo-skeptics are equally worried.
Adoption and unease: Not quite a paradox
Read together, the numbers suggest something more nuanced than a simple AI boom.
The industry is not actually trading caution for speed. It’s doing both at once: pushing AI further into the center of the business while security concern rises in exact proportion. Four waves of data now confirm this isn’t a blip: it’s the shape of the market. It’s also the dynamic of decision-making power and priorities in different parts of a company.
That dynamic can be particularly tense with the SMB layer of the internet infrastructure service provider community, where already-overtasked teams have to make existential decisions while also trying to keep the lights on.
Eyes on the industry
The open question heading into the next wave is whether strategy and security concerns eventually catch up with adoption, or whether the gap between “moving fast” and “thinking it through” keeps widening.
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