If you want your cloud security posture to hold up in 2026, focus less on adding controls and more on reducing the policy surface area you’re responsible for, because your policy count will always grow faster than your team’s ability to reason about it... Here's what actually matters going into 2026: 1. Consolidate policies before you scale anything else Cloud multiplies policy volume; consolidation is the only sustainable counterweight. 2. Re-evaluate segmentation based on real traffic, not intended design Most segmentation strategies don’t survive contact with east–west movement. 3. Interrogate “normal-looking” internal traffic Agent chatter (like MCP wrapped in HTTPS) is becoming a major lateral movement vector. 4. Shift from visibility to interpretability You don’t need more dashboards, you need to understand what the traffic means in context. 5. Remove human interpretation from repetitive rule decisions Humans can’t keep up with tens or hundreds of thousands of policy objects; workflows must be deterministic. Where should security teams focus first? - Policies should be fewer, cleaner, and aligned to application boundaries (not infrastructure diagrams) - Segmentation must be verified, not assumed - East–west traffic should be treated as a primary control objective, not a supporting detail - Policy logic should be explainable to any operator, not just the person who wrote it - Internal agent-to-agent communication needs active governance, not passive trust Agree? Disagree? Add your take below. And tag someone who should be part of this conversation.