2025 in Review: What Alberta Businesses Should Know Going Into 2026

Here's what happened, what it means, and what to expect next year.

The Cloud Outages

The biggest technology stories of 2025 weren't cyberattacks. They were mistakes at major technology companies that took down large portions of the internet.

In October, Amazon Web Services had a prolonged outage caused by a DNS issue in their Northern Virginia data center. Slack went down. Atlassian products became unavailable. Businesses that had no idea they depended on AWS suddenly couldn't communicate or access critical applications.

A few weeks later, Microsoft Azure had its own outage affecting Microsoft 365, Xbox, and major retail websites. The cause was a configuration change that shouldn't have been pushed to production.

Then in November, Cloudflare went down. ChatGPT, Spotify, and dozens of other services became temporarily unavailable. The root cause was a database permissions change that created an oversized configuration file.

None of these were sophisticated attacks. They were operational errors. The kind of mistakes that can happen at any organization. The difference is that when they happen at companies running infrastructure for millions of businesses, the consequences spread in ways that are hard to predict.

AI Went Mainstream

A year ago, tools like ChatGPT were still a novelty for many businesses. By the end of 2025, that changed. AI adoption roughly doubled over two years. Most organizations now report using AI for at least one business function.

The cost of AI tools dropped significantly, making technology that was previously out of reach suddenly accessible to smaller organizations. AI became genuinely useful for everyday tasks: document drafting, customer service responses, data analysis, content creation.

But rapid adoption created new problems. "Shadow AI" became a concern. Employees discovered they could use free AI tools to speed up their work, often without considering the implications for data security or accuracy.

For regulated industries, this created compliance headaches. Healthcare practices found staff using AI to draft patient communications without understanding privacy implications. Transportation companies discovered drivers using AI navigation tools that didn't account for vehicle-specific restrictions.

Cybersecurity

The cybersecurity landscape followed a familiar pattern, but faster. Ransomware remained the most disruptive threat for mid-sized businesses. Small and medium organizations continued to represent the vast majority of victims.

What changed was sophistication. AI tools that make work easier for legitimate users also make work easier for criminals. Phishing emails became harder to detect because AI could generate flawless, personalized messages without the grammatical errors that used to be a warning sign. Voice cloning technology advanced to the point where criminals could impersonate executives in real-time phone calls.

The most notable shift was in how attackers gained access. Rather than exploiting complex technical vulnerabilities, most breaches came through compromised credentials and social engineering. The fundamental security problem remained human, not technological.

Multi-factor authentication became table stakes. Organizations still relying on passwords alone found themselves increasingly exposed. Yet adoption remained incomplete. Many small businesses still hadn't implemented basic security measures.

What to Expect in 2026

Business Continuity Planning

The 2025 outages served as a wake-up call. Business continuity planning, once considered something only large enterprises needed, is becoming a priority for businesses of all sizes. This includes not just data backup, but documented plans for operating when critical systems become unavailable.

More businesses will ask harder questions about their technology dependencies: What happens if our internet goes down? What happens if our cloud provider has an outage? What happens if our primary software vendor has problems?

AI Gets Real for Small Business

The experimentation phase is ending. In 2026, AI becomes a practical question for most businesses.

The capability shift. Small businesses can now do things that previously required staff they couldn't afford. Research, drafting, analysis, summarization. A five-person company has access to capabilities that used to require specialized hires or expensive consultants. That's a meaningful change.

The judgment question. The tools are accessible. The harder part is developing judgment about when AI helps and when it doesn't. Knowing what to delegate to AI and what still requires human attention is a skill most organizations are still building. That matters more than which specific tools you choose.

The policy gap. Most SMBs don't need an AI strategy. They need basic guardrails. What's acceptable to put into these tools? What information shouldn't go into a public AI service? What decisions require human review? The companies that figure this out early avoid problems that show up later when adoption has already happened without oversight.

Hybrid Infrastructure

The all-or-nothing debates about cloud vs. on-premises infrastructure are fading. Most organizations are settling into hybrid approaches that use cloud services for some functions while maintaining local control over others.

This is particularly relevant in Canada, where data sovereignty requirements and geographic distance from major data centers create practical reasons to maintain some local infrastructure.

Zero Trust Security

The traditional security model of protecting a network perimeter is giving way to approaches that verify every access request regardless of where it originates. Rather than assuming that anything inside the corporate network is safe, zero trust assumes threats could come from anywhere.

For businesses with remote workers, multiple locations, or cloud-based applications, this offers a security model that matches how people actually work today.

Practical Steps

The technology landscape of 2026 will bring both challenges and opportunities. The outages of 2025 reminded us that the systems we depend on are more fragile than we assumed. The rapid adoption of AI showed us that useful new tools can spread faster than policies can keep up. And the continued evolution of cyber threats demonstrated that security is an ongoing process, not a one-time project.

For Alberta businesses, the goal isn't to predict every development or adopt every new technology. It's to build resilience, maintain awareness, and make deliberate choices about how technology serves your business.