Published originally on March 31, 2026 by Mauricio Sanchez on Dell'Oro Group.
The breadth of the meeting set mattered because it helped separate conference noise from patterns that repeated across very different vendors. The conversations ranged from companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, Google, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Netskope, Cloudflare, and Broadcom to smaller and earlier companies with narrower starting points, such as AppGate, Cloudbrink, Helmet Security, Neon Cyber, and Zenarmor. That range made it easier to see which themes were structural rather than promotional. It also reinforced that the market still maps back to the existing taxonomy. Identity remains the trust plane. Endpoint remains the local execution plane. Network Security remains the distributed enforcement plane, with SASE increasingly the most ambitious effort to unify that plane across multiple edges. Cloud Security remains the workload and infrastructure context plane, with Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) increasingly central to prioritization and remediation. Application Security remains the software assurance and remediation plane. Data Security is becoming more central in the policy and governance plane. Security Operations remains the operating layer that turns all of that into action.
That broader structure also helps make sense of another shift that surfaced repeatedly during the week. For much of the past two decades, enterprise security could increasingly assume a user-to-cloud model: users and endpoints on one side, centralized applications and data on the other, with the network in between. That assumption is weakening. Applications, data, and increasingly AI execution are becoming distributed again across endpoints, browsers, branches, private clouds, public clouds, and SaaS. That makes the control-plane problem less about how users reach centralized resources and more about how trust, telemetry, policy, and enforcement remain coherent as both actors and execution environments become more distributed.
AI Is Becoming a Force Multiplier for Action Governance
The most consistent message from the meetings was not that AI has created a wholly separate security universe. It was that AI is accelerating a broader move toward action governance. The market is spending less time asking how to secure a model in isolation and more time asking who or what is acting, what it can access, how it is observed, and what policy should govern that behavior.
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That distinction matters for vendors and market watchers. The real competitive question is not who can attach the term “AI security” to the most products. It is who can connect authorization, observability, policy, and control into an operating model that enterprises can actually use. The stronger vendors increasingly sounded less focused on treating AI as an isolated layer and more focused on absorbing it into broader control planes.
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