KPMG 2026 Cybersecurity Report: 8 CISO Priorities

https://www.cybersecurity-insiders.com/kpmg-2026-cybersecurity-report-ciso-priorities/

Publish Date: 2026-05-31 15:25:00

Source Domain: www.cybersecurity-insiders.com

KPMG’s 2026 cybersecurity report names non-human identities as one of eight load-bearing risks for the year, drawn from interviews with more than 20 KPMG cyber leaders and senior executives at Google, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, the AI-and-network-security vendor, and ServiceNow, the workflow automation platform. The argument the cybersecurity report lands hardest for CISOs: AI agents, service accounts, and machine credentials now outnumber human users inside most enterprises, and the identity-governance practices built for humans do not survive that ratio. The other seven considerations cycle around the same problem of scale, from post-quantum cryptography migration to IT/OT hyperconnectivity.

Non-human identities now outnumber humans in most enterprise environments, demanding lifecycle governance for service accounts, AI agents, and machine credentials.
Autonomous security agents are moving into the security operations center (SOC), compliance workflows, and identity management, shifting workforce skills toward agent oversight.
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration is now an explicit regulatory program in multiple jurisdictions; finance and defense face existential pressure to act.
Supply-chain attack surface keeps expanding into AI and IoT, pushing third-party risk management toward continuous monitoring instead of annual review.
The CISO mandate has broadened to cover physical-cyber convergence, AI safety, and board-level resilience reporting.

What the KPMG 2026 cybersecurity report puts on the CISO desk

The full report, available as a downloadable PDF on the KPMG site, is organized around eight considerations: preparing the cyber workforce for autonomous security; navigating geopolitics, resilience, and compliance; safeguarding AI systems; managing non-human identities; enabling trusted IT/OT hyperconnectivity; transitioning to post-quantum cryptography; protecting the supply chain through detection and response; and…

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