Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

You probably feel this already: the surface you’re responsible for no longer has edges. New assets appear without tickets. A team flips on a SaaS app and suddenly sensitive data, OAuth scopes, and public links widen your blast radius. Your scanners keep finding “stuff,” but little of it changes what you fix next week. That’s the gap attack surface analysis has to close in 2026—seeing more, yes, but mainly acting faster on what actually matters.

By Randy Blasik, Founder, ComplianceAide The good news for managed service providers (MSPs) supporting defense contractors is that demand for Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) and NIST 800-171 readiness services is surging. The downside, unfortunately, is that many MSPs have discovered that delivering compliance engagements at scale can be difficult and complex.

Most law firms have moved email, documents, and collaboration to Microsoft 365. And most assume Microsoft is backing up that data. They’re wrong. According to Microsoft’s own Services Agreement, “We recommend that you regularly backup Your Content and Data that you store on the Services or store using Third-Party Apps and Services.” Microsoft provides infrastructure redundancy—if their data center has a problem, your data is replicated elsewhere.

For many organizations, ServiceNow operates as the system of record for governance, auditability, and compliance. But when incidents occur, engineers often need to consult external tools to identify and resolve the root cause. When investigations are siloed from the system of record, engineers must return to ServiceNow to manually update work notes, incident statuses, and mandatory resolution fields before closing tickets.

Proactively addressing risks in technical environments is a constant challenge. Many teams wait until it’s too late and key application functionality is disrupted or sensitive data is exposed. However, understanding risk severity in context can be difficult, especially in distributed systems where related issues and impacts may not be immediately obvious.

Think back to the old image of a “cyberattack”: a hacker in a dark room trying to smash through a digital firewall to reach a dusty server. In 2026, that’s a relic. Today, the most dangerous threat actors aren’t breaking into your house; they’re walking through the front door with a copied key.

Remote access into OT and ICS environments has always carried risk. But the nature of that risk has changed. Threat detections now happen in seconds. Sensors identify anomalous behavior in real time. Identity platforms continuously evaluate trust. SIEM and OT security tools generate rich, contextual alerts instantly. Yet in most environments, access enforcement is still manual. A detection triggers a ticket. A human reviews. A decision is made. Minutes—or hours—pass before action is taken.

Endpoint security encompasses the processes and technologies used to protect end-user devices—including laptops, servers, mobile devices, IoT systems, and any connected asset with access to corporate resources. As organizations become more distributed and adversaries become more sophisticated, the endpoint has evolved into both a preferred target for threat actors and a pivotal control point within a modern security architecture.