Accenture is paying about $4.2 billion to acquire a majority stake in industrial-security firm Dragos and full ownership of runZero and NetRise. The move aims to build a single platform for protecting OT networks in critical infrastructure and factories. Dragos keeps its leadership and independence but will operate under Accenture’s umbrella, giving clients a broader set of tools—asset discovery, vulnerability scanning, threat detection—backed by Accenture’s global delivery model. Infoblox reports that over 65 percent of its cloud customers made DNS requests to residential-proxy domains, more than 500 billion queries per month in 2026. Free VPNs, streaming apps and browser extensions on employee and unmanaged devices are turning company networks into ad hoc proxy farms. That raises legal exposure, reputational damage, and hidden security blind spots that network, endpoint and DNS teams must hunt down. Meanwhile, Cisco cut help-desk tickets by 18 percent and eliminated over 20 VPN variants after moving to a cloud-delivered Security Service Edge. They rolled out certificate-based Zero Trust access and GenAI traffic inspection for data-loss prevention, phasing the shift in stages rather than tearing everything out at once. Amazon Security’s VP argues that “human-in-the-loop” checks can’t scale for autonomous AI agents—judgment erodes with repetitive approvals. Instead they tie every action to the agent’s identity, with fine-grained, risk-based permissions to curb rogue goal-seeking. OpenAI, on the other hand, launched enterprise spend controls and richer usage analytics in ChatGPT Enterprise so admins can enforce budgets and track adoption by team. And the Model Context Protocol’s Enterprise-Managed Authorization extension just hit stability—users sign in once via Okta, Anthropic, VS Code or other identity providers and gain seamless OAuth access to all enabled MCP servers without repeated consent screens. Microsoft’s push to bake Copilot into Windows and Office has IT teams scrambling. Default-on AI features are landing before clear governance or admin tools. Some shops worry about performance hits, licensing complexity and privacy. In contrast, Qubot—an internal Copilot-powered analytics agent—lets employees query raw, silver and gold data layers by natural language, routing questions to Kusto or Trino depending on the context. Early results: broad adoption inside the company, fewer analytics tickets and faster, more accurate answers backed by high-quality structured metadata.