In 2026, publicly disclosed cyberattacks in Japan are running at their highest pace in 5 years, while the defensive market is expanding through the parallel growth of major platforms and emerging companies. AI adoption is creating new entry points one after another.
The article positions the cybersecurity market as a market that is growing not as a single market, but through the expansion of what must be protected and changes in the economics of attack and defense. The scope of protection is expanding from the internal-external boundary to zero trust, the cloud, data, and AI agents, while government supply-chain measures are also driving growth.
The article identifies Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and Cloudflare as factors behind the emergence of major platforms, noting that the 3 companies secured key entry points before expanding into adjacent areas. Starting from entry points such as firewalls, endpoints, and network paths, each company has grown through platformization, modularization, and the sharing of threat intelligence across networks.
Wiz and Cyera are presented as examples of growth among emerging companies. Wiz grew rapidly through an agentless architecture that visualizes risk across the cloud and prioritizes risks, and was acquired by Google. Cyera has made protection of the data itself its core focus and is expanding its entry points through the acquisitions of AI Guardian and Oasis Security. The article emphasizes a structure in which changes in the technology environment create new entry points.
AI is significantly changing the economics of attack and defense. Attackers are reducing costs through automation and division of labor, while defenders are using automated tools such as XBOW to enable high-frequency, wide-ranging testing. The article concludes that although AI adoption is expanding the scope of protection, performance track records and deployment bases will serve as moats.
In conclusion, the factors determining the next winners in a market where attacks will not disappear come down to data advantages, the strength of the deployment base, combining specialization with integration, and how companies overcome barriers to entry in the AI era. Managing where AI agents can access may ultimately become the next promising area.