If you think IT trends are just buzzwords, buckle up, 2026 is about to prove you wrong!
What happened in 2025 is nothing short of revolutionary. There was a moment when we were using AI with uncertainty and apprehension, and then there wasn’t. Suddenly, AI pervaded everything that we knew and it transformed everything that we did and said. So when we talk about key infrastructure and operations trends that are reshaping the industry, AI, agentic AI and AIOps take the numero uno spot. That said, this blog is not just about AI in IT Ops; it is also about what remains true from the past. It is also about what has consolidated into everyday operations, eventually helping businesses move forward the way they should.
Let’s look at the top 5 trends.
While 2025 marked the year AI arrived with a bang, 2026 is the year AIOps (AI-driven IT Operations) emerges and showcases its full potential.
Jeffrey Hewitt, VP Analyst at Gartner, says, “Agentic AI provides a significant opportunity for I&O leaders in that it enables performance gains through time savings, which will increase over time as systems evolve. It can support I&O by quickly analyzing complex datasets, identifying patterns and acting autonomously.”
It is a giant leap from simple monitoring systems; these advanced systems now utilize ML and analytics to detect issues, reduce alert noise and automate remediation, significantly lowering operational toil. With AIOps, teams can proactively identify vulnerabilities, optimize resource allocation and even predict outages before they occur. Moving away from just reactive work, the use of AI in IT operations now enables teams to become more predictive, helping establish autonomous infrastructure management where dependency on human and manual intervention is significantly reduced.
This change empowers IT teams to shift from firefighting to foresight. Automated root cause analysis and self-healing capabilities enable routine incidents to be resolved in real-time, freeing up skilled professionals to focus on innovation rather than repetitive tasks.
Until recently, the shift to the cloud was the most transformative change for businesses worldwide. Organizations raced to embrace becoming cloud-first - cloud migration, cloud adoption, cloud-native….you get the drift!
However, as businesses grew, boardrooms began weighing financial and strategic parameters, realizing that laying all your chips in the cloud might not be the smartest decision. Sometimes moving partially to the cloud or retaining specific workloads on-premises seemed more prudent. Sometimes keeping work on different clouds seemed more wise. For the past few years, the hybrid model has been an intermediate step, a transitional state on the path to the cloud. But not anymore. Hybrid has become the endgame. Hybrid is no longer a stopgap solution. It is a deliberate strategy.
In 2026, hybrid has now become a steady-state architecture.
Today, businesses attempt to orchestrate workflows seamlessly across on-premises, multiple clouds and edge devices. In fact, Gartner positions hybrid computing at the core of Infrastructure and Operations. It predicts that by 2028, more than 40% of leading enterprises will integrate hybrid computing architectures into their mission-critical workflows, up from the current 8%. Hybrid computing is now one of the prime contenders for IT infrastructure and emerging Trends
Progress Chef manages consistent configurations across heterogeneous environments, whether your infrastructure resides in a public cloud, private cloud or on-premises data centers. This reduces drift, standardizes environments and accelerates hybrid deployment models.
The Chef platform also provides Declarative State Management, so you define desired states once and enforce them everywhere, whether it’s AWS, Azure, GCP or on‑premises. Inbuilt compliance checks integrate CIS, STIG, and custom policies directly into deployment policies, covering both cloud and on-premises environments equally.
As for edge devices, Chef supports both agent and agentless execution, making remote configuration of edge devices across all environments a reality. This flexibility is crucial for hybrid setups that involve remote devices or systems with restricted access.
Additionally, Chef orchestration allows you to run complex workflows across heterogeneous estates. And the cherry on the top is that you can sequence these workflows, apply compliance checks and manage maintenance windows all from one control plane- the new Chef 360 platform.
We talked about it 10 years back. We continue to talk about it in 2026. While IaC is not a new concept, it has matured over the years and seen larger-scale adoption than ever before. Treating infrastructure definitions in the form of code is a popular trend, because it is a sturdy, secure and reliable approach. Teams want version-controlled, repeatable, reproducible and auditable infrastructure. And they do not want to maintain it manually every time, especially when they have to deliver reliable change across complex, hybrid environments
Progress Chef is a pioneer of IaC. Chef has long championed the IaC and configuration automation, providing declarative policy as code that integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines. Unlike other tools that focus on configuring infrastructure in a step-by-step manner, Chef employs a declarative, policy-based model. The desired end state of infrastructure is defined as code. It then continuously monitors that state and corrects any drifts, ultimately focusing on intent-driven automation rather than reactive fixes.
As environments span hybrid, multi-cloud and edge devices, scripting becomes brittle. The Chef policy-as-code model scales because it focuses on what infrastructure should look like, regardless of where it runs.
As the complexity of environments, tools, and workloads rises, the need to orchestrate workflows that are repeatable, reliable, scalable, and with guardrails has become a necessity for I&O operations. Orchestration is the backbone of modern IT operations, enabling end-to-end automation across hybrid environments. It goes beyond just running scripts; it brings governed workflows with approvals, health checks and rollbacks into a single, auditable pipeline. In 2026, orchestration enables consistency, compliance and resilience at scale.
The Chef solution aligns and transforms fragmented automation into governed, end-to-end workflows. With Chef, organizations can orchestrate complex deployments across hybrid environments. Unlike traditional tools, Chef embeds Policy-as-Code, also executing compliance checks during orchestration, not after. Combined with agentless execution for edge and restricted systems, Chef delivers unified visibility and orchestration that is secure, predictable and scalable across on-premises, multi-cloud and edge estates.
By 2026, platform engineering will no longer be a niche practice. It’s a mainstream strategy. Gartner predicts that 80% of software engineering organizations will have platform teams, making internal developer platforms the backbone of enterprise IT.
These platforms deliver golden paths, self-service automation, and embedded governance, enabling teams to move faster while maintaining security and compliance. As hybrid estates and AI-driven operations become increasingly complex, platform engineering provides the consistency and control businesses need to scale without chaos.
The Chef 360 platform is a purpose-built platform that delivers a unified control plane, combining Infrastructure as Code, Policy as Code and governed orchestration into one seamless experience. With Chef 360, platform teams can define environments declaratively, enforce compliance during every change, and orchestrate workflows across their entire estate. Chef 360 provides real-time visibility across hybrid estates, whether they are on-premises, multi-cloud or edge. By supporting both agent-based and agentless execution, the Chef 360 platform ensures flexibility without sacrificing governance, making it the backbone for modern internal platforms that prioritize speed, security and consistency.
As we continue our journey in 2026, staying informed about IT infrastructure and emerging trends will be essential for IT leaders. Chef 360 empowers teams to navigate the evolving landscape of infrastructure and operations trends. Organizations that embrace these trends, not as isolated initiatives but as interconnected pillars, will see success in creating a resilient and secure IT foundation. Chef 360 stands at the center of this transformation, offering a unified control plane that empowers teams to define, enforce and orchestrate change with confidence, across disparate environments.