India, Jan. 28 -- For years, digital infrastructure functioned quietly in the background as a collection of data centres, APIs, cloud services, and pipelines engineered to keep systems running. It processed workloads, scaled compute, and ensured business continuity.

This, however, is changing in 2026. Today, infrastructure is no longer passive. Instead, it is being reshaped to participate-to govern, to interpret, and in some cases, to decide. The trend is also reflected in three recently published studies-Cisco's 2026 Data and Privacy Benchmark, New Relic's AI Impact Report, and HCLSoftware's Tech Trends 2026.

The reports suggest that the change is not about migrating to the cloud faster or modernising data pipelines incrementally. Rath...