If 2023-2025 was the period of "prove it" for cloud, automation and generative AI, 2026 is shaping up to be the year of "operate it" - at scale, under market pressure, and with a sharper need to maintain (and demonstrate) the technology value proposition. 

Across UK and European organizations, we are seeing a clear shift from experimental AI to operational resilience and governed automation in IT infrastructure management and services. The conversation is moving from "Can AI help?" to "Can AI help safely, repeatedly and measurably - without increasing risk, cost or complexity?" 

According to Gartner's 2026 Infrastructure and Operations trends, the themes shaping IT operations include hybrid computing, agentic AI, AI governance platforms, energy-efficient computing, disinformation security and "geopatriation”. 

Below are the top five talking points we expect to dominate infrastructure management and services discussions in 2026 - and why. 

1) Hybrid infrastructure becomes the default operating model 

Why it will trend in 2026 

• Workload placement decisions are harder (latency, data gravity, cost, sovereignty and energy). 

• "Post-migration reality" sets in the priority is optimizing and governing what already exists. 

What it will focus on 

• Fewer standard patterns, with clear placement rules and lifecycle ownership. 

• A consistent control plane for identity, policy and observability across environments. 

2) AIOps and agentic AI shift from assistants to accountable automation 

Why it will trend in 2026 

• Alert fatigue and tooling sprawl are forcing better correlation and automation. 

• Availability expectations keep rising while teams are asked to do more with the same headcount. 

What it will focus on 

• "Guarded autonomy": automate low-risk/high-volume tasks first; keep approvals for high-impact changes. 

• Closed-loop runbooks with rollback and post-change validation, so automation improves resilience rather than adding fragility. 

3) Governance, sovereignty and "geopatriation" become design inputs 

Why it will trend in 2026 

• AI governance is becoming practical operational work: accountability, logging and data controls. 

• Organisations are rethinking dependencies and regionalising workloads where needed. 

• What it will focus on 

• Governance controls embedded in ITSM/ITOM: change management, access workflows and evidence capture. 

• Third-party management that treats cloud/SaaS as critical dependencies with measurable resilience expectations. 

Reference point: the European Commission's AI Act timeline notes that the AI Act entered into force on 1 August 2024 and will be fully applicable from 2 August 2026. 

4) Security and operational resilience become measurable - and providers are in scope 

Why it will trend in 2026 

• Customers and regulators increasingly expect demonstrable resilience, not just policies. 

• Supply-chain and identity risks continue to drive incidents. 

What it will focus on 

• Recovery engineering (tested backups, rehearsed restoration, recovery objectives tied to business impact). 

• Continuous control visibility, immutable logs and repeatable incident response playbooks. 

Reference point: the European Commission notes that EU Member States had until 17 October 2024 to transpose the NIS2 Directive into national Law. 

5) Cost, capacity and carbon converge: FinOps meets energy-efficient computing 

Why it will trend in 2026 

• AI workloads increase compute demand, raising scrutiny on utilization and unit economics. 

• Sustainability expectations are shifting towards measurable outcomes. 

What it will focus on 

• Unit-cost thinking for critical services (cost-to-run, drivers, trends). 

• Workload optimization and waste reduction as continuous processes, not periodic clean-ups. 

Reference point: FinOps Foundation "State of FinOps" reporting highlights optimization as a top priority for practitioners. 

What this means for managed services in 2026 

As hybrid complexity, AI-enabled operations, evidence-led resilience and FinOps discipline rise together, operating models matter. Managed services will keep moving away from "ticket volume" and toward measurable outcomes: reliability, recoverability, security posture and cost efficiency. 

TESTQ case study: Governed automation and resilience in a hybrid estate 

In late 2025, TESTQ supported a UK-headquartered FINTECH organization operating across the UK and EU with a hybrid estate (on-premise core platforms, multiple cloud subscriptions and growing SaaS usage). They faced four familiar challenges: 

• Slower incident response due to alert noise and inconsistent runbooks. 

• Increasing supplier assurance and audit requests, with manual evidence collection. 

• Cloud spend rising faster than service demand, with limited allocation visibility. 

• Uneven security control coverage across on-premise and cloud services. 

Our approach focused on repeatability and control: 

1) Service mapping and observability standardization - aligning monitoring to "important business services" and building consistent dashboards for impact-led triage. 

2) Guarded AIOps automation - AI-assisted correlation and recommendation, with change controls for high-risk actions and full audit trails. 

3) Resilience operating rhythm - scenario testing, recovery validation and dependency reviews (including third-party and SaaS). 

4) FinOps hygiene - tagging standards, rightsizing, scheduling non-production and a process to remove waste. 

Outcome 

The value was not a single tool - it was a governed operating model. Teams reduced time lost to noisy alerts, improved consistency of incident handling and generated audit-ready evidence through automation. Leadership gained clearer reporting on service health, resilience gaps and cost-to-run. 

Conclusion 

In 2026, infrastructure management and services will be defined by operational trust: trust that hybrid estates are controllable, automation is governed, resilience is tested, and cost and sustainability are managed without compromising availability. 

At TESTQ, we help organizations turn these talking points into practical operating capabilities - combining modern infrastructure management, safe automation and measurable service outcomes. 

To discuss how TESTQ can support your infrastructure roadmap for 2026, contact the team at testq@testqtech.com.