The new year brings a fresh opportunity to strengthen your cybersecurity posture and ensure your business is prepared for whatever 2026 has in store for you. Once you’re refreshed from the holidays, it’s the perfect time to reset, reassess, and rebuild your IT strategy with intention.
Here are five smart resolutions that can help you boost resilience, reduce risk, and make 2026 your most successful and secure year yet.
See where you stand with a full cybersecurity assessment
Before you can improve your security posture, you need a clear picture of your current one. A comprehensive cybersecurity assessment will uncover hidden vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, outdated systems, and inefficiencies in your existing defenses. Your assessment should include at a minimum:
- A review of network security, firewalls, endpoints, and cloud configurations
- An evaluation of your access controls, backups, and patch management
- Tests and attack simulations to identify weak points
This gives your business a measurable baseline and a prioritized list of security improvements, so you can put focus where it needs to be. If your IT team lacks the expertise or time to perform such a thorough assessment, consider partnering with an IT consultancy for access to knowledge and a fresh perspective.
Reevaluate your security spending
It’s easy to let your cybersecurity budget stay stagnant; nothing’s happened yet, so why spend more? But as threats and technologies evolve, you may have to spend more to keep up, or you may find that you are actually paying too much.
That’s why early in the year is a smart time to analyze how you’re allocating resources. Are you spending wisely on solutions that actually protect your business? Or are outdated tools and unused platforms taking up valuable budget?
With a thorough budget review, you can:
- Identify useful additions to your cybersecurity posture, such as new software
- Eliminate redundant or ineffective software
- Prioritize spending on the tools and systems that benefit you most
Cybercriminals don’t stand still, and neither should your security investments, but don’t just throw money at the problem. Reassess and reevaluate to stretch your cybersecurity dollars as far as they will go.
Schedule cybersecurity training and refresher courses
Human error remains one of the leading causes of security incidents, especially for small and mid-sized businesses. New scams powered by AI, such as vishing, are worryingly effective and convincing, so employee training is more essential than ever.
Make it a goal in 2026 to provide hands-on, role-specific training that helps employees recognize and avoid known and emerging attack methods. Also, consider offering quarterly refresher courses to reinforce best practices and update your workforce on the latest threats.
Even the best cybersecurity tools can’t compensate for an untrained workforce. Make a plan for a year-long education course to ensure a secure 2026 and peace of mind.
Perform a compliance checkup
If your business is subject to regulatory requirements such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, or other government or industry regulations, the start of the year is the perfect time for a compliance review. Ensuring that you remain compliant reduces the risk of the other highly damaging consequences of a data breach: regulatory fines.
It’s important to do a yearly checkup because regulators update rules frequently, and falling behind can expose your business to penalties. Ignorance of changes in the law is not an acceptable excuse, so check if anything has changed and find out what is needed to maintain compliance under the new rules.
Map your 2026 cybersecurity journey
Once you know your security baseline, budget priorities, training requirements, and compliance obligations, the final step is turning this insight into a roadmap. Mapping out your cybersecurity journey for 2026 and documenting it will keep you on course and help you follow through on those New Year’s resolutions.
If you want to ensure your business stays secure and strong in 2026, contact XBASE and partner with our experienced cybersecurity consultants. We’ll help you draft a custom 2026 cybersecurity roadmap and implement the tools you need to make it a reality.