2026 Physical Security Trends Report
Enterprise physical security has progressed beyond chaos, but is hovering short of scale-ready governance.
Compliance urgency is rising. Device fleets are expanding.
However, visibility, automation, and cross-team integration aren’t keeping pace.
See how 300 enterprise security leaders are managing physical security infrastructure, and where most organizations are falling short.
Why get the report?
See how your visibility, automation, and governance maturity compare to peers across industries.
Uncover where partial automation and hybrid ownership models are creating risk and operational drag.
Learn why compliance is a top priority, yet few teams feel fully equipped to manage it at scale.
75.6% said compliance is a “high” or “top” priority. And yet…
- Only 3% are fully confident in their ability to address compliance issues (firmware updates, password rotations, EOL/EOS planning)
- Only 2.3% are fully confident their current tools are sufficient to manage and maintain device health and compliance at scale.
Governance pressure is real and rising across Director, Head of (Department/Function), VP, and C-level (Chief Officer) roles.
70.3% сited limited visibility into device status across sites as a top barrier to proactively address issues like firmware, passwords, certificates and EOL/EOS.
Despite modernization efforts, full centralized oversight remains rare.
74% said day-to-day manual management of physical security devices impedes their ability to focus more strategically on risk.
Operational friction is not episodic. It’s structural.
97.7% do not have full centralized visibility across all devices and locations.
Enterprise physical security is functioning, but not even close to being fully governed.
Most teams are not failing. They are plateaued.
Few organizations have achieved true, centralized, automated governance at scale or are confident their current tools are helpful.
A little over half our respondents described their approach to managing physical security devices as “mostly automated with some manual processes.”
And yet, 76% said their current
tools fall short when it comes
to automating routine
compliance tasks.
Only 3% are fully confident
their tools can effectively
address noncompliance.
The higher the seniority, the wider the gap between perception and reality.
Senior leaders set the strategy, but the data suggests they may not see the full picture. Across compliance confidence, tool adequacy, and management preferences, a consistent pattern emerges: the further from day-to-day operations, the more optimistic the outlook.
C-suite leaders are significantly more confident in their compliance tools than the Directors managing them day-to-day.
Only 52% of C-level respondents prefer in-house control of their physical security infrastructure, compared to 78% of Directors who want it.
77% of directors say manual device management impedes strategic risk work. At the C-level, that number drops to 54%.
Ready to see where you stand? Get the report.
Download the 2026 Physical Security Trends Report for:
- Full breakdowns by industry and seniority
- Crosstab analysis of third-party reliance, automation maturity, and visibility
- Insight into why hybrid models are plateauing
- A framework for moving beyond “good enough”
