Ryft has published "The State of Apache Iceberg in the Enterprise (2026)," an independent survey of 252 senior data and IT leaders highlighting Apache Iceberg's emergence as a foundational table format in modern enterprise data architectures. The study, conducted by TrendCandy in January 2026, underscores Iceberg's role in powering large-scale analytics, AI, and machine learning workloads while identifying operational maturity as the next critical focus area.
The survey demonstrates strong momentum for Apache Iceberg across data-intensive industries in North America and Europe. Respondents, primarily executive, VP, director, and manager-level leaders, manage environments ranging from hundreds of terabytes to multiple petabytes. Iceberg's open table format has delivered tangible benefits, including enhanced query performance and the enablement of advanced analytics and AI initiatives previously constrained by legacy systems. Organizations credit Iceberg with fostering greater data accessibility and trust across teams, driving innovation in high-impact use cases.
While satisfaction with Iceberg's capabilities remains high, the research identifies a clear gap in operational tooling as deployments mature. Most enterprises depend on bespoke scripts and internal solutions to handle table optimization, fine-grained access controls, compliance enforcement, and disaster recovery. These manual approaches introduce risks, inconsistencies, and increased overhead in multi-engine environments with thousands of tables. As Iceberg powers the industry's largest data lakes and most demanding AI workloads, achieving operational excellence at scale has become essential for maintaining security, reliability, and performance.
“Iceberg has entered its next chapter, powering the industry's largest data lakes and most demanding AI workloads. We’re moving past the 'getting started' phase and into the era of operational excellence.” said Yossi Reitblat, CEO of Ryft. “Success now depends on how well you can operationalize the stack to guarantee security and performance at scale.”
This study positions Apache Iceberg as the de facto standard for modern data lakes, particularly in AI-driven enterprises. The findings emphasize the shift from initial adoption to sophisticated management, where automated, unified solutions are needed to address scaling complexities and ensure consistent governance. Organizations that bridge this operational gap will be best equipped to maximize Iceberg's value for analytics, machine learning, and future AI innovations.
About Ryft
Ryft (ryft.io) is the AI Data Lake built for Apache Iceberg. Ryft helps companies build a fully autonomous Iceberg data lake for ML & AI workloads, optimizing data in real time based on usage patterns, automating compliance, managing access controls from a single place, and ensuring data access is efficient, reliable, and secure. Ryft is used by data-intensive companies, including Unity, Sonos, and Voodoo, to maintain operational consistency as Iceberg environments scale. Ryft is backed by Index Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners.
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