As we step into 2025, the cybersecurity landscape is at a pivotal juncture. The challenges of AI-driven threats, evolving data privacy standards, relentless breaches, and the looming quantum computing era demand vigilance and innovation. Our predictions signal a shift from reactive defense to proactive transformation, where companies and vendors alike prioritize secure-by-design technologies, continuous encryption, and quantum-resilient solutions.
Continued government regulation and the rising cost and consequences of data breaches will pressure companies to uplevel data privacy initiatives to a strategic business imperative
The Challenge: With data breaches continually rising, data privacy is as significant a concern as ever. Standards around the globe, such as the UK’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), also pressure the U.S. government to keep up. At the same time, the cybersecurity industry demands regulation to help companies protect their customers and their brands.
Many non-technology industries need to be faster to update their legacy infrastructure, but struggle due to cost constraints and limited resources. With the continued movement toward digitalization and the use of vast cloud data storage, this situation cannot continue. Businesses simply can’t afford the high cost of a breach. This scenario is especially true in healthcare, which remains a primary target of cyber attacks.
Many organizations have relied on cyber insurance for protection in the event of an infringement, but the sheer volume of breaches triggers insurance providers to terminate coverage when negligence is deemed a factor. In addition to the steep regulatory fines and penalties resulting from a breach, companies also face class-action lawsuits from their business and consumer customers, costing organizations hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars. Company executives and Boards of Directors are now being held personally liable when customer data falls into the wrong hands, tainting their reputations and subjecting them to punitive action.
DataKrypto Prediction: Companies will increasingly address data privacy strategically and operationally, investing in new infrastructure and technology to develop stringent data protection to avoid the costly consequences of cybersecurity attacks. Adversely, such investments can create new attack surfaces, which will be addressed with innovative, privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) like secure multi-party computing (SMPC), trusted execution environments (TEEs), confidential computing, and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).
Data breaches will lessen as cyber developers focus on building “secure by design” applications that protect data throughout its lifecycle.
The Challenge: Today’s relentless onslaught of data breaches costs companies millions yearly and erodes trust in their brands. Traditional encryption methods leave data exposed and unencrypted during operations and data transitions, exposing companies to gaps in protection and costly data leaks. Sophisticated attackers exploit these vulnerabilities, exposing organizations to expensive breaches. This scenario has left organizations scrambling to find and invest in solutions that enable end-to-end data protection throughout its lifecycle — safeguarding data at rest, in use, in transit, and every point in between.
For several years, Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) was touted by cryptography experts as an ideal solution to close the gaps created by traditional encryption and protect data at all times. FHE essentially allows data to be processed while still encrypted, so data is never “in clear” or unprotected. Many companies have attempted to achieve a performant FHE solution. Still, the technology’s high incremental costs, integration complexities, and performance bottlenecks have prevented its widespread adoption and practical implementation for real-world business use cases.
New FHE innovations are now coming to market that overcome the technology’s complexities and performance issues, making it a viable way for development teams to build applications with inherent data protection mechanisms suitable for real-time business use cases. FHE maintains data confidentiality throughout its lifecycle by enabling computations on encrypted data, significantly reducing the attack surface for many common cybersecurity threats. As such, we expect a dramatic shift in 2025 toward more widespread adoption of FHE, a trend that will continually expand in years to come.
DataKrypto Prediction: New FHE innovations that make real-world deployment practical, affordable, and manageable will help companies across industries maintain continuous data protection and minimize the impact of many prominent attacks (see below). As attackers realize their efforts to breach systems and access confidential data are ineffective, they will eventually focus elsewhere.
Cybersecurity vendors will introduce “quantum-safe” solutions as quantum computing poses new risks.
The Challenge: As quantum computing advances, organizations worldwide are growing increasingly concerned about its potential impact on cybersecurity. While experts estimate the post-quantum computing (PQC) era is still five to 15 years away, forward-thinking companies are preparing for this inevitable future. Hackers aren’t waiting for the PQC era; they’re harvesting data now, anticipating future decryption capabilities.
To address the potential threat of quantum attacks, in August 2024, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finalized its principal set of encryption algorithms designed to withstand cyberattacks from a quantum computer, encouraging computer system administrators to transition to the new standards as soon as possible. At the same time, NIST stated that the 2048-bit keys used by Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) encryption should continue to offer sufficient protection through at least 2030.
As the world prepares for a PQC future, companies face a more immediate threat: the gaps in data protection when data is in use for analysis and computation, and when it moves between different stages in its lifecycle. Advanced encryption algorithms, such as Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), are being adopted to overcome these gaps. FHE allows for data computations without decryption, ensuring end-to-end, continuous protection. Symmetric FHE in particular is quantum resistant, making it a strategic investment for future needs and ensuring protection of data today.
DataKrypto Prediction: In response to the forthcoming quantum computing threat combined with the ongoing need for end-to-end data protection, we see two trends emerge:
- Organizations will prioritize implementing advanced quantum-resistant cryptographic techniques, such as Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) based on symmetric encryption.
- Cybersecurity vendors will advance algorithms already in development to make quantum attack-proof security systems a reality.
As we look ahead to the coming year, we’re standing on the precipice of a new era in cybersecurity. It’s not just about defense anymore; it’s about innovation, about turning challenges into opportunities. We’re excited to share what’s top of mind for us as we head into a new year, based on conversations with our customers, and technology leaders and cybersecurity innovators.
As cyber threats grow in sophistication, 2025 will identify the trailblazers who turn these challenges into opportunities, setting a new standard for resilience and trust in an increasingly digital world.
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