Enterprise technology planning for 2026 is pulling in multiple directions this week. Across the EU, cyber resilience requirements for digital products have been strengthened under the Cyber Resilience Act, while adoption of AI technologies continues to expand in everyday business processes. At the same time, ongoing pressures on infrastructure, storage and networking highlight how interconnected these agendas have become for enterprise IT leaders and partners alike.
What ties these elements together is not sudden change, but a pattern of rising expectations — for compliance, performance and resilience — that is now shaping refresh and investment cycles across the UK and Europe.
EU Cyber Resilience Act raises baseline for product security
The Cyber Resilience Act, formally adopted by the European Parliament and Council, sets common cybersecurity standards for products with digital elements throughout their lifecycle. These rules call for improved incident reporting, stronger default security measures and broader obligations for manufacturers of connected devices and software components.[1]
For enterprise buyers and those designing complex IT landscapes, the Act reinforces that security is no longer an isolated checkbox but a foundational requirement. When organisations build or refresh infrastructure — whether for modern applications or AI‑powered workloads — security expectations are now baked into the very definition of compliant platforms.
In customer conversations that span virtualisation, networking and server design, having a resilient, standards‑aligned infrastructure stack is increasingly a prerequisite. That is where Hammer’s networking range and broader infrastructure portfolio can help partners articulate architectures that not only perform well but align with broader cyber resilience demands.
Enterprise AI adoption continues its steady climb
Data from European digital economy reporting continues to show a gradual but persistent rise in AI use across EU enterprises. Around one in five companies with ten or more employees now report using AI technologies in business processes, moving beyond pilot projects to mainstream analytics, automation and decision support applications.[2]
That transition into operational use changes how enterprises think about compute and data infrastructure. Workloads that combine traditional transactional processing with AI‑assisted models require careful platform consideration — not just raw performance, but the balance between CPU, memory and storage throughput. Partners engaging with enterprise buyers can ground these conversations in specific configurations drawn from Hammer’s servers and AI technologies offerings, helping demystify what a “real world” AI‑capable platform looks like in 2026 planning cycles.
Rather than chasing peak performance claims, this grounded approach helps teams align infrastructure investments with expected business outcomes and avoid overprovisioning or under‑sizing key components.
Storage and component pressures reflect broader workload trends
Underneath the headlines on cybersecurity and AI adoption, storage markets continue to adjust to evolving demand patterns. High‑performance enterprise SSDs remain in tight supply relative to need, driven in part by rising data volumes and more demanding access patterns from AI and analytics workloads.[3]
For many enterprise buyers and partners, this dynamic manifests as a classic trade‑off: performance expectations rising even as budgets tighten and capacity requirements grow. Hammer’s depth in enterprise data storage solutions and enterprise components allows partners to frame storage decisions around tiered strategies, helping organisations balance cost, latency and capacity in ways that align with real workload behaviour rather than vendor‑driven all‑flash narratives.
This is particularly relevant when organisations are already factoring in additional cybersecurity telemetry or AI model data flows, both of which can add to storage performance pressures without a corresponding increase in budget.
What this means for your 2026 planning
Taken together, the tightening of EU cybersecurity requirements, the steady embedding of AI technologies into everyday enterprise processes, and the underlying pressures on storage and infrastructure create a complex planning landscape. For UK and European IT leaders, MSPs and partners working with Hammer, the imperative is clear: look at architecture holistically, not in silos.
Server choices that balance performance and resilience, network fabrics designed for both operational and compliance traffic, and storage tiers tuned to actual demand are no longer optional details — they are central planning decisions. Bringing these elements together through a coherent platform view supported by Hammer’s portfolio helps organisations navigate 2026 with confidence rather than reactionary catch‑up.
More detail on Hammer’s product families and how they fit together in real enterprise environments is available at www.hammerdistribution.com.