Enterprise IT leaders and partners are navigating overlapping pressures this week: tightening EU cybersecurity standards under the Cyber Resilience Act, steady adoption of AI across business workloads, and ongoing demands on storage and networking technology performance. These intersecting forces are quietly shaping how organisations plan, refresh and support infrastructure heading into 2026.
None of these developments is a sudden shift, but together they emphasise that infrastructure decisions are no longer deferred until later stages of a project cycle — they are central to compliance, performance and resilience strategies.
EU Cyber Resilience Act raises baseline for digital product security
The Cyber Resilience Act, adopted by the European Parliament and Council, creates a more unified set of cybersecurity standards for digital products throughout their lifecycle. The regulation introduces enhanced incident reporting, stronger default security requirements and broader obligations for suppliers of connected devices and embedded software.[1]
For enterprise teams in the UK and EU, this regulatory shift means cybersecurity expectations are now part of the fabric of infrastructure planning rather than an add‑on. Compliance is not just about avoiding fines; it is about building platforms that withstand modern threats and integrate smoothly into broader IT operations.
In real conversations with customers, these compliance expectations increasingly pull networking decisions and platform design discussions earlier into refresh and deployment plans. Having tangible architectures that address security from the ground up — whether that means resilient network fabrics or secure physical infrastructure — is where Hammer’s networking solutions and broader infrastructure portfolio add value. Partners can help customers articulate and specify these foundational components in ways that align with both regulatory demand and operational goals.
AI adoption expands within enterprise workloads
Enterprise adoption of artificial intelligence features continues to climb. Recent statistical reporting indicates that roughly one in five EU enterprises with ten or more employees now use AI technologies in routine business processes, expanding beyond early experiments into analytics, automation and decision support functions.[2]
That steady embedding of AI into everyday operations changes how infrastructure is sized, balanced and refreshed. Rather than viewing AI workloads as an isolated subsystem, organisations increasingly expect mainstream platforms to flex with a mix of traditional and AI‑augmented workloads.
Requests for server configurations now tend to include questions around accelerated compute, memory bandwidth and storage throughput much earlier in planning phases. Anchoring these discussions to real and validated offerings — such as Hammer’s servers and AI technologies — helps partners guide customers toward balanced architectures rather than speculative overbuilds. This approach helps maintain predictability in cost, power and performance without overspending for peak cases that may never materialise.
Storage performance demands quietly reflect underlying workload change
Underneath regulatory and AI adoption signals, ongoing pressures in storage demand reflect changing enterprise workload patterns. Market analysts have noted that enterprise SSD demand rises as data growth and access patterns evolve under mixed transactional and AI‑centric use cases. High‑performance storage tiers remain sought after even as cost considerations complicate refresh choices.[3]
In conversations with enterprise buyers and partners, this plays out as a familiar balancing act: performance needs rising while budgets and capacity expectations remain constrained. Hammer’s experience across enterprise data storage solutions and enterprise components allows partners to frame storage tiering strategies that align with real workload behaviour, using fast SSD for latency‑sensitive layers and greater capacity media for bulk storage. This pragmatic approach avoids the pitfalls of blanket “all flash” recommendations while delivering responsiveness where it matters most.
By tying these storage decisions back to actual business requirements — for AI analytics, compliance telemetry or data lakes — customers avoid unnecessary cost escalation while keeping performance predictable.
As cloud and on‑premise environments grow more interconnected, having a consistent architectural view that brings together compute, networking and storage becomes increasingly valuable when planning for the next refresh cycle.
More detail on Hammer’s product families and how they fit together in real enterprise environments is available at www.hammerdistribution.com.