Cybersecurity in 2025: AI, Attack Surfaces and the Shift to Cyber Resilience – Source: securityboulevard.com

Hello, I’m Krista Case, research director on the team here at The Futurum Group. I’m here today to walk you through three of the key trends that we’re going to be watching in the cybersecurity space. The first topic is the fact that AI is accelerating the race between attackers and defenders. The second topic is the fact that attack surfaces are sprawling and this is really creating the perfect storm. Number three is the fact that data protection is evolving into cyber resiliency.

Let’s look at the first topic. AI is accelerating this race between attackers and defenders. The meteoric rise of DeepSeek so far this year in 2025 has really shown a limelight on the fact that attackers are not only using AI to up their game, create more innovative and more efficient attack techniques, but at the same time, they’re also targeting large language models and things of that nature to be able to do things like capture user personal identifiable information and other things. 

The flip side of this coin is how we’re seeing enterprises use AI from a defensive perspective to try to, as much as they can, keep a step ahead of how attackers are evolving their techniques. Speak a lot with practitioners and they’re really looking to their vendors to be able to make capabilities like detection of anomalous activity and to be able to identify potential breaches sooner and also to be able to respond to them more quickly. Again, certainly something that, just as attackers are not sleeping on the opportunity for AI, defenders certainly are not as well. 

The second topic is sprawling attack surfaces. An explosion in the number of SaaS applications in use by the given enterprise for example. We have the rise of remote work and the myriad of devices that enterprises are accessing corporate data from. We have a growing number of IoT devices and growing OT environments for example. We also have supply chains that have become more sprawling than ever before. So as attackers have become more innovative in their approaches, the potential attack surface is also much more difficult for security practitioners to be able to get visibility into and establish control over. 

Our third topic is data protection evolving into cyber resiliency. This topic is very closely interweaved with our first two topics because it is naturally the data at the end of the day that attackers are targeting. As it becomes more difficult for enterprises to stay ahead of attackers and prevent them from getting in, the precedence is placed on recovering data as quickly as possible and getting these critical business services back up and running. So for data protection companies, what this means is baking in capabilities like that anomalous detection that we talked about of potentially nefarious activity, and then to be able to potentially take action, like creating a snapshot as soon as that activity is detected and automatically uncovering the best recovery point. There’s also a growing correlation between data protection vendors and incident response that you’ve seen, both through partnerships and acquisition activity. 

So the takeaway from these three key trends is really that there’s new technology requirements that really have been emerging over the last 18 to 24 months. Buyers are evaluating all of the vendors that they’re working with across the cybersecurity space and they’re really looking for ways to address these new threats, shore up their security posture, and any potential goals and to be able to mitigate any business impact if they are breached. 

So with that, I want to thank you for joining me. Please make sure to also check out the video from Fernando Montenegro, our VP in this space who’s going to be covering some other trends that we’re going to be watching in cybersecurity this year. And make sure to check out our ebook for a discussion of all of the trends and topics across the technology space that we’re watching. Thank you so much again and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.