The key technology trends shaping 2025
As we rapidly approach 2025, Rob Batters, Director of Technical and Managed Services, pick up on some of the key technology trends we believe will impact over the coming year. We provide a high-level overview of the most important trends to watch out for, painting a picture of what the technology landscape will look like in the year ahead and the impact this will have on industry.
Change has become the new normal
2024 was undoubtedly a year of seismic change in the UK. A new government came into power and delivered a subsequent UK budget which represents a significant tax burden – which will impact UK businesses both large and small in 2025. This has all happened against an economic backdrop of tightening regulations, ongoing geopolitical turmoil, and wavering consumer trust, where change and uncertainty has become the new normal.
2025 will bring in an era when leaders start to understand the technology lessons they have learnt in previous years and how they can utilise these learnings and apply them to more specific use cases, delivering better ROI and ultimately profit.
Those who succeed must be deliberate and focused, balancing short-term wins with longer-term foundational improvements. As mentioned earlier, none of these actions happen in a vacuum and many have co-dependencies. As a result, emerging threats, new challenges, and technology innovations are set to redefine how businesses build resilience while enhancing productivity and performance to deliver ROI.
If we look at the geopolitical turmoil and when this is set to end, you will need a crystal ball to determine the outcome of the ongoing Ukraine and Russia conflict, but with North Korea now involved, we can certainly expect more cyber warfare activity from those involved, which makes the overall landscape less stable.
Those who succeed must be deliberate and focused, balancing short-term wins with longer-term foundational improvements. Share on XContinuing cyber security trends
In 2025, the threat posed to businesses by hackers, data theft cyber warfare and other cyberattacks is immense and, as a result, we see several cyber-related technology trends in 2025. These include Fine Grained Authorisation (FGA), a method of controlling access to systems and data based on multiple conditions, which is set to replace Role Based Access as applications become increasingly complex. That’s because FGA is more detailed than other access control methods, which may only consider broad categories like user roles or resource types. FGA weighs up a wider range of factors, including the user’s role and their attributes, the action the user wants to perform, and the resources they want to interact with. It also looks at time of day and the user’s recent behaviour.
We will also see a significant reduction in the use of shadow data. Shadow data is a term used to describe unknown, hidden, or overlooked copies of sensitive information that exist outside the purview of an organisation’s IT security measures. In other words, this is data that is not governed and not sourced from the original copy which becomes a significant target for data theft. It’s also more difficult to identify and contain, which is one of the reasons why cyber criminals target it.
It is a game of cat and mouse however, and as cyber criminals devise new attack vectors, so vendors scramble to devise news ways to defend against such attacks. This is an inevitable cycle that will continue in 2025.
Tightening regulations
At the same time, we have witnessed a tightening of regulations, and this will continue to be the case in the year ahead. The second Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2) has already come into force and the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) will come into force in January 2025. Both these regulations aim to help organisations build in better cyber risk management and operational resilience. Additionally, the promised UK Cyber Security and Resilience bill will receive parliamentary time at some point in 2025. Unfortunately, the UK Digital Protection and Information Bill, which was intended to balance data protection with innovation and replace GDPR, was expected to be tabled, but the change in government has seen this bill dropped.
With all this increasing regulation, it looks like we’re finally coming around to an expectation that organisations must and will be more secure. And I would urge organisations to invest in security now – even if budgets are tight – rather than pay for the clean-up, the financial and reputational damage later.
A new era of computing
On a more positive note, we will see a new era of computing. NVIDIA recently announced that the NVIDIA Blackwell platform has arrived — enabling organisations everywhere to build and run real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models at up to 25x less cost and energy consumption than its predecessor. The NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs will be available in Azure VMs alongside a host of other technologies, bringing privately controlled AI to anyone with an account. The Blackwell GPU features six transformative technologies for accelerated computing, which will help unlock breakthroughs in data processing, engineering simulation, electronic design automation, computer-aided drug design, quantum computing and generative AI. This will power a new industrial revolution as it realises the potential of AI for every industry. It will be exciting to see how this initiative continues to unfold in 2025 and beyond.
In summary, as the UK continues to transition due to macroeconomic developments that have unfolded over the past year, we expect 2025 to be a year where the focus shifts to boards seeking ways to more accurately predict the market and increase profit margins and where the spotlight will undoubtedly focus on enhancing security and operational resilience.