Businesses in Asia Pacific should stop debating future-proofing and start acting in 2026, moving away from proprietary single-vendor technology stacks that can become a financial and strategic liability, SUSE‘s head of solution architecture for the region Peter Lees said.
“2026 isn’t the year to still be pondering future-proofing, it’s the year to act,” Lees said in a set of predictions for next year, warning that vendor lock-in can carry long-term consequences and in some cases pose an existential threat.
Lees said resilience would sit at the centre of enterprise technology decisions as governments and regulators push the idea of digital sovereignty, with companies expected to take greater control of data and platforms. He said flexible, open technology choices could help organisations avoid steep migration costs and unexpected price increases.
Edge computing will also accelerate as data is created and processed closer to where it is generated, including in smart factories, retail kiosks and remote healthcare, Lees said.
He added that organisations that cannot securely manage and unify large numbers of edge endpoints risk losing efficiency and competitiveness, with containerisation emerging as the preferred way to handle distribution and scale.
On cybersecurity, Lees said perimeter-based models were no longer sustainable and would give way to zero-trust approaches built around the principle of never trust, always verify.
Since eliminating all vulnerabilities is unrealistic, he said the focus should shift to preventing weaknesses from being exploited at the moment of execution, requiring secure-by-default software, particularly in container environments.
Lees also said AI adoption would demand infrastructure that is context-aware and secure by design, arguing that open source approaches can help organisations retain platform flexibility while meeting privacy requirements.
Strategic openness, he said, would act as an insurance policy against supplier risk by giving companies choice, protecting budgets from vendor-driven cost swings and helping them adapt to technologies that have yet to emerge.
