How Are You Planning to Strengthen Cybersecurity in 2025?

When it comes to cybersecurity in the cloud, what’s on your New Year’s resolution list? Leading goals for many organizations include making their cloud environment more secure and compliant and delivering more consistent and rigorous controls. If these goals resonate with your organization’s cybersecurity needs, you may want to consider enlisting a cloud expert to help you conduct a cloud security posture assessment before the end of the year.

The more you know about your cloud architecture’s security posture, the better you will know what needs to be done to make the right improvements for reducing risk in 2025. Essential elements to include in your assessment are finding your strengths and weaknesses, discovering where you deviate from industry best practices, and understanding what a resilient cybersecurity roadmap should look like.

What are the top 2025 security predictions?

Experts have assessed the leading security risks for the coming year and posted their predictions. Among them are these insights:

• Ransomware will become more sophisticated, with threat actors increasingly using AI and automation to spread breaches across networks quickly, according to Gartner.
• AI overall is a growing risk because it can be used to analyze large amounts of data quickly, allowing threat actors to find and exploit security weaknesses with greater speed, according to Forbes.
• Defending against the ever-increasing risk in cybercrime will reach $12 trillion in 2025, according to Forrester.  

Among the leading security worries for CISOs in the 2025 New Year are: 

• Dealing with the risk of alert fatigue as cyberthreats increase: “Alert fatigue, also known as alarm fatigue or notification fatigue, is a prevalent issue common across many fields, including healthcare, construction and mining, information technology and cybersecurity. While it similarly plagues these different industries, alert fatigue in cybersecurity may be the most complicated and problematic,” according to Proofpoint.
• Working to defend the supply chain as security risks increase: “As we look ahead to 2025, several trends are impacting the supply chain; from ransomware as a service (RaaS), to the evolving tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) used by advanced persistent threat actors (APTs),” according to the National Motor Freight Traffic Association.
• The rise and rapid escalation of AI-driven attacks: “In 2025, AI will drive both attacks and protections. Security teams will rely on AI-powered tools tailored to their unique environments. But adversaries will respond with increasingly sophisticated, AI-driven phishing and deepfake campaigns,” said Dr. Dorit Dor, Chief Technology Officer at Check Point told CXOToday.com.

To-dos in 2024 for stronger cybersecurity in 2025

To help your organization prepare to stay secure into the New Year, conduct a cloud security posture assessment before the end of 2024, following these critical steps:

• Assess your security posture’s current strengths and weaknesses.
• Perform a cloud security hygiene check to discover orphaned workloads, new instances or cloud applications that are not covered under your security umbrella.
• Review user access policies and permissions. Have you had employees come and go throughout 2024? If so, it’s time to run a check to ensure only the right users can access the information relevant to their current job function.
• Scan environments and software for vulnerabilities and outdated software patches. Regular patching helps reduce the chance of an attacker exploiting outdated software to gain access to your sensitive data.
• Run detection scans to identify and remediate cloud resource misconfigurations and compliance risks.
• Conduct a gap analysis of your current state security infrastructure.
• Develop design recommendations for more effective security operations and incident response plans.
• Determine how to best implement and enforce information security standards across a multicloud environment.
• Ensure that organizational policies exist to enforce governance structures and align engineering and development with security guardrails.
• Align security control mapping to relevant regulatory frameworks.

Expert help for assessing your cloud security posture

When you’re ready to prepare your security posture to meet your cybersecurity goals in 2025, you don’t have to go it alone. A team of security experts from Rackspace Technology® can help you assess your cloud security posture for your cloud environment — including Microsoft® Azure®, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud. Our experts will execute the following steps:

• Conduct a series of deep-dive workshops to understand your current-state security architecture, controls, policies and procedures.
• Evaluate how well your business conforms to legislative or regulatory requirements and industry standards.
• Assess your cloud environment’s alignment with your required security, compliance and audit controls.
• Recommend a future-state cloud security reference architecture.
• Create a prioritized action plan, compliance operating model and improvement roadmap.
• Help implement recommended improvements for launching a cloud security operating model quickly and effectively.

Improve your security — and set yourself up for success in the New Year. Schedule a cloud security posture assessment before the end of 2024.