Gartner has announced the top cybersecurity trends for 2025, influenced by generative AI (GenAI) evolution, digital decentralising, supply chain interdependencies, regulatory change, endemic talent shortages and a constantly evolving threat landscape.
Alex Michaels, senior principal analyst at Gartner, says: “Security and risk management (SRM) leaders face a mix of challenges and opportunities this year, with a goal to enable transformation and embed resilience. Their efforts in achieving both are crucial to support their organisation’s aspirations to not only innovate, but ensure their innovations are secure and sustainable in a fast-changing digital world.”
The following six trends will have broad impact across these areas:
Trend 1: GenAI Driving Data Security Programs
Most security efforts and financial resources are traditionally focused on protecting structured data such as databases. However, the rise of GenAI is transforming data security programs, shifting focus to protect unstructured data — text, images and videos.
“Many organisations have completely reoriented their investment strategies, which has significant implications for large language model (LLM) training, data deployment and inference processes,” said Michaels. “Ultimately, this shift underscores the changing priorities that leaders must address as they communicate the impact of GenAI on their programs.”
Trend 2: Managing Machine Identities
Increasing adoption of GenAI, cloud services, automation and DevOps practices, has led to the prolific use of machine accounts and credentials for physical devices and software workloads. If left uncontrolled and unmanaged, machine identities can significantly expand an organisation’s attack surface.
According to Gartner, SRM leaders are under pressure to build a strategy to implement robust machine identity and access management (IAM) to protect against attacks, but it must be a coordinated enterprise-wide effort. A Gartner survey of 335 IAM leaders globally, conducted between August and October 2024, found that IAM teams are only responsible for 44% of an organisation’s machine identities.
Trend 3: Tactical AI
SRM leaders are facing mixed results with their AI implementations, leading them to reprioritise their initiatives and focus on narrower use cases with direct measurable impacts. These more tactical implementations align AI practices and tools with existing metrics, fit them into existing initiatives, and enhance visibility of the real value of AI investments.
“SRM leaders now have clear responsibilities to secure third-party AI consumption, protect enterprise AI applications and improve cybersecurity with AI,” said Michaels. “By focusing on more tactical, demonstrably beneficial improvements, they can minimise the risks for their cybersecurity programs and can more easily demonstrate progress.”
Trend 4: Cybersecurity Technology Optimisation
According to a Gartner survey of 162 large enterprises, conducted between August and October 2024, organisations use an average of 45 cybersecurity tools. With over 3,000 vendors in cybersecurity, SRM leaders need to optimise their toolsets to build more efficient and effective security programs.
Gartner recommends aiming for a balance that procurement, security architects, security engineers, and other stakeholders are satisfied with to maintain the right security posture. To achieve this, SRM leaders should consolidate and validate core security controls and focus on architecture that enhances portability of data. Threat modeling and organisational technology drivers such as AI adoption can also be used to assess advanced needs.
Trend 5: Extending Security Behaviour and Culture Program Value
Security behavior and culture programs (SBCPs) have reached an inflection point for most organisations. Effective SRM leaders recognise the value these programs bring to improve their cybersecurity posture. According to Gartner, one of the largest drivers of change in these programs is GenAI – enterprises combining the technology with an integrated platforms-based architecture in SBCPs will experience 40% fewer employee-driven cybersecurity incidents by 2026.
This trend is gaining traction due to increasing recognition that both good and bad human behavior are critical components of cybersecurity. As a result, cultural and behavior-focused activities have become a prominent approach to address cyber-risk comprehension and ownership at the human level. This reflects a strategic shift toward embedding security into the organisational culture.
Trend 6: Addressing Cybersecurity Burnout
SRM leader and security team burnout is a key concern for an industry already impacted by a systemic skills shortage, according to Gartner. This pervasive stress stems from relentless demands associated with securing highly complex organisations in constantly changing threat, regulatory and business environments, with limited authority, executive support and resources.
“Cybersecurity burnout and its organisational impact must be recognised and addressed to ensure cybersecurity program effectiveness,” said Michaels. “The most effective SRM leaders are not only prioritising their own stress management, they are investing in teamwide wellbeing initiatives that demonstrably improve personal resilience.”