Austin, TX, March 04, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Attackers move laterally through a compromised cloud network in 29 minutes. The fastest do it in 27 seconds. Defenders take an average of 241 days to notice. Doug Merritt, CEO of Aviatrix(R) and former CEO of Splunk, says that asymmetry isn't a technology problem–it's an architectural one. And AI is about to make it catastrophically worse. “The cybersecurity industry just had its best financial year in history, and enterprises have never been less secure,” said Doug Merritt. “That's not a paradox–it's the inevitable result of trying to solve an architectural problem with 76 point solutions. And by the way, AI doesn't fix this. AI makes it both worse and significantly more urgent.” Merritt will make this case at AIxCYBER, hosted by Momentum Cyber on March 12 in Austin, TX. The panel–“The $119 Billion Bet: Why Agentic AI Just Made Cybersecurity the Most Strategic and Valuable Market in Tech”–draws on data from Momentum Cyber's 2026 Cybersecurity Almanac, which documented $119 billion deployed across 1,222 transactions, with M&A deal value up 270 percent year-over-year. Merritt will introduce a framework he calls the Architectural Divide–the widening gap between the speed at which enterprises deploy cloud and AI workloads and their security architecture's ability to enforce consistent policy across them. He argues the problem is structural, not solvable by adding more tools, and that the industry's $119 billion record year is the market repricing because the problem is unsolved–not evidence that it's being fixed. As CEO of Splunk, Merritt led the company through its transformation from on-premises data platform to cloud native leader through Cisco's $28 billion acquisition. He has lived the innovation-to-fragmentation-to-consolidation cycle firsthand–and argues cloud security is deep in the fragmentation phase, with consolidation coming. Panel Details Event: AIxCYBER, hosted by Momentum Cyber Date: March 12, 2026 Location: Austin, TX Panelists: Doug Merritt (Aviatrix), Eric Foster (TENEX.AI), Greg Genung (Snowfire.AI), Creighton Hicks (LiveOak Ventures) Moderator: Eric McAlpine, Founder & CEO, Momentum Cyber
About Aviatrix
For enterprises struggling to secure cloud workloads across multi-cloud, hybrid, and edge environments, Aviatrix(R) delivers what 76 tools cannot: a single architecture for pervasive cloud security. The Aviatrix Cloud Native Security Fabric (CNSF) provides runtime security and enforcement within the cloud infrastructure itself. For more information, visit aviatrix.ai.
Alicia Pollard Aviatrix 888-311-8328 corpcomms@aviatrix.com