2025 Predictions: Driving Digital Resilience Forward

It can be hard to find solid ground as technology, regulations, and digital resilience strategies constantly shift beneath your feet. With generative AI investments now favoring more targeted outcomes, compliance challenges spreading to unlikely places, and an increase in the volume and sophistication of cyberattacks — how can organizations stay upright against all this change?  

Today, I’m pleased to announce the release of Splunk Predictions 2025. In the report, Splunk and Cisco executives map out what business and technology leaders can expect next year — how current trends will evolve and what organizations should consider during strategic planning. We know that organizations often feel like they're caught in quicksand. That’s why we offer seven forward-looking predictions along with actionable guidance to help them come out of 2025 standing firm and ahead of the curve.

From AI to regulations and everything in between, here’s what organizations can expect in the coming year. 

In the AI of the Storm

"We're just beginning the next chapter of AI. The next generation of LLMs will be domain-specific." – Hao Yang, VP of Artificial Intelligence, Splunk

Think AI infatuation will ease up? Think again. We predict it will only continue. But unlike years past, there’ll be a noticeable difference in investment strategy. After two years of funding floods, anxious boards will demand tangible returns, prompting business and technology leaders to alter their AI plans. This means dedicating more resources to practical AI use cases, such as enhancing productivity and operations in the SOC and NOC, and quantifying the value created. 

In addition, our executives predict more organizations will embrace domain-specific small language models (SLMs), which reduce operating costs and environmental impact relative to large language models (LLMs). They’re also more accurate because they’re not trained on general data sets from the public domain, which will better serve businesses looking to leverage AI like a subject matter expert. 

To Resilience and Beyond

"How does an organization prepare for the unknown? Well, that’s exactly what digital resilience is. Executive teams are finding new, innovative ways to safeguard it." – Petra Jenner, SVP and General Manager, EMEA, Splunk

2024 — filled with headline-grabbing digital outages and security breaches — proved that organizations can’t achieve digital resilience alone. To stay up and running and secure within today’s complex network architectures, organizations and their technology vendors will work side-by-side on joint risk management and response planning to defend business continuity. 

Organizations will also expand collaboration and creative problem-solving within their own walls. To prevent losing $400 billion annually from system downtime, ITOps and engineering teams will find connections between performance incidents, customer experience, and critical business metrics. Traditionally seen as a reactive, troubleshooting practice, Splunk and Cisco leaders predict that observability will become more proactive — optimizing and informing application features and product roadmaps. 

Navigating “Materiality” and Regulations

"When it comes to resilience, ‘good enough’ will no longer be acceptable." – Simon Davies, SVP and General Manager, APAC, Splunk

Next year’s regulatory changes will be a mixed bag for organizations. On the one hand, governments worldwide will finally define a cybersecurity material incident in clear terms, allowing CISOs and their boards to establish explicit policies and processes to follow. On the other hand, geopolitical changes will reshape data residency, privacy, and AI laws, causing confusion for companies globally. This uncertainty will force CISOs, CIOs, and general counsels closer together to address shifting governance demands to ensure the organization stays compliant and resilient. 

Driving Digital Resilience Forward

No matter what happens next, the most successful leaders will be prepared for every possibility. After all, that’s what resilience is all about. As Jeetu Patel, EVP and Chief Product Officer at Cisco put it: “Modeling resilient behavior and showing flexibility and openness to change is a hallmark of future-proof executive teams."

Discover more tips on how to drive your organization's digital resilience forward. Download Splunk Predictions 2025 today.