By Raghu Nandakumara, Head of Industry Solutions, & Trevor Dearing, Director of Critical Infrastructure Solutions at Illumio

In a new age marked by the rise of catastrophic attacks, AI, and increasingly sophisticated ransomware, there's a lot on cybersecurity leaders' minds. Cybersecurity is no longer uncharted territory. Corporate decision-makers are investing more and continue to hire, building out threat response strategies and adopting realistic frameworks to stop threats. According to IDC, global cybersecurity will grow to nearly $300 billion in 2026.

Despite significant investments in preventative measures like endpoint and perimeter security solutions, breaches continue to occur. To achieve cyber resilience, organizations must expand their focus and find ways to limit the impact of a successful breach so that catastrophic outcomes are avoided.

As the cybersecurity landscape continues to shift, here's how companies will (or should?) adapt their cybersecurity strategies in 2025.

2025 will demand security investments are accountable, not fashionable

Security budgets will continue to rise in 2025, but we'll see less investment in fashionable technologies like NDR and SOAR, and more on technologies that can minimize the impact of attacks and protect critical assets.

Organizations have come to the realization that it's impossible to eliminate the probability of an attack and security strategies will shift to a perspective that, while prevention is essential and should be deployed where logical, it must rest on a foundation of breach containment.

The C-Suite finally gets serious about cyber

We've seen a steady increase in cyber awareness in the boardroom over the past couple years, however, 2025 will be the year when we finally see this shift from awareness to accountability.

Business leaders will follow in the footsteps of high-profile leaders like Satya Nadella at Microsoft, taking ownership of cybersecurity and preventing security leaders from shouldering all the blame from cyber incidents. Improving operational resilience will become the priority and this will drive a focus on substance over optics when it comes to cybersecurity investments.

Say "goodbye" to the CISO and "hello" to the CSO

The nuanced and specialized role of the CISO will be phased out in 2025 to make way for Chief Security Officers (CSOs), driven by increased interconnectivity and the convergence of IT and OT systems. Organizations recognize that threats are no longer siloed in separate areas of the business and require a leader to unify all risks and provide comprehensive oversight of security.

The CSO will also sit on the executive team and board, ensuring that the top of the organization is not only aware of cybersecurity issues but is also accountable for security-related decisions and strategies.

The rapid adoption of Zero Trust and NIST Cybersecurity Framework as IT and OT systems converge

As operational technology (OT) systems increasingly become smarter and more connected, we'll see a rapid shift in organizations' security strategies and technologies. OT environments will begin to look a lot more like IT environments and traditional security architectures, such as the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture, will become obsolete in favor of modern approaches like Zero Trust that promise greater gains in operational and cyber resilience.

Containment will overtake prevention as the cybersecurity strategy of choice

The focus in 2025 will finally shift from preventing attacks to mitigating their impact. Organizations are spending increasing time, money and resources on prevention and detection technologies like EDR and are still getting breached, so the focus will move toward a breach containment strategy that emphasizes resilience and continuity.

Organizations will begin rigorously assessing minimum viable operations to maintain essential services, mapping out detailed rebuild protocols, and establishing recovery measures to minimize downtime. This will not only protect critical services but also reduce the fallout of any single attack, shifting the security dialogue towards "how fast can we recover" rather than "how do we prevent this?"

Final thoughts

2025 will be the year of the CSO, rapidly changing attitudes toward security, and increasingly stringent measures taken to contain security threats. As organizations refine approaches to security, we will see better resources devoted to containing the breach to better stop adversaries in their tracks.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Raghu Nandakumara is Head of Industry Solutions at Illumio, the Zero Trust Segmentation company. Based in London, UK, Raghu is responsible for helping customers and prospects across a variety of industries build resilience and accelerate zero-trust outcomes with zero-trust segmentation. Previously, Raghu spent 15 years at Citibank, where he held several network security operations and engineering roles. Most recently, he served as a senior vice president, where he was responsible for defining strategy, engineering, and delivery of solutions to secure Citi's private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. Raghu holds an undergraduate degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Cambridge, and a master's degree in advanced computing from Imperial College London.

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Trevor Dearing is the Director of Critical Infrastructure Solutions at Illumio and has been at the forefront of new technologies for nearly 40 years. From the first PCs through the development of multi-protocol to SNA gateways, initiating the deployment of resilient token ring in DC networks and some of the earliest use of firewalls. Working for companies like Bay Networks, Juniper and Palo Alto Networks he has led the evangelization of new technology. Now at Illumio he is working on the simplification of segmentation in Zero Trust and highly regulated environments.