Top Ten for 2025 and Beyond

With the start of a new year comes an opportunity to think about what opportunities that technology could bring organisations over the coming 12 months. With a federal election in Australia next year, the ongoing discussion of our lack of productivity growth and concerns about the electricity grid stability, will likely stay in the headlines.  In thinking of the year ahead in terms of prioritization - opportunities for technology to enhance productivity through improvements in data analytics and process automation continue to be attractive, but our ability to fund, consume and manage the required change is the challenge we still face.  

The BTC Team has identified key IT trends and technology challenges that we feel our clients will be facing next year. As independent IT management consultants, we not only see a variety of different industries suffering the same issues, but it’s our job to help you identify and form the solutions. Please feel free to contact us at any time to discuss how Beyond Technology can help your organisation with independent actionable advice that is free from conflict of interest.

Of course Generative AI has to still be on the list for 2025, with the technology industry increasing its billions of dollars of investment on a daily basis, the future opportunity for business will be as transformative as the industrial revolution. The challenge for 2025 will remain planning and preparing the foundational infrastructure to be ready to be a proactive partner of the business in the deployment of AI and digital capabilities. Security and technical governance remain problematic and we continue to find business receptive to transitioning to a more focused risk management approach.

1. Cyber Security Act 2024, The Intelligence Services and SOCI Amendment Act's  

The Australian Parliament passed a suite of legislative reforms on November 25, 2024 to implement seven initiatives under the 2023-2030 Australian Cyber Security Strategy. It will be a priority of all Australian businesses to understand and prepare for the significant changes in obligations and the required technical control and policy requirements.

2. Carrier diversity and operational/cyber resilience

As the learnings from the 2023 Catastrophic Optus Network failure continue to bubble down the remaining carrier contracts and legacy network architectures, we have seen all the carriers reluctantly accept that best practice equals carrier diversity.

3.  Digital Supply Chain risk assessment and management

This continues to be a regular topic in most board discussions. With the majority of the big publicised data breaches being initiated through an outside channel, everyone has recognised that your people and your partners can be there undefended weak link in their cyber defence. 3rd party audit rights, attestations and mandatory assessments have become a common response and we can expect this trend to continue in 2025.

4.   Data & Analytic transformations

As organisations have continued to digitise and collect more business data, both the opportunity and the risk has steadily increase. While most organisations now understand the risk of storing everything for ever, the growing capabilities of AI engines in analytics have doubled the need for deliberate planning on your data & analytics transformation journey.

5.  AI, Privacy and Cyber Governance Policy

Ongoing Structured Experimentation with AI tools will require both planning and risk mitigation strategies. The need to consider your technical and control policies across your technology environment to meet both ethical and legislative governance requirements will also become increasingly critical with the new privacy regulations and cyber security obligations legislated in 2024.

6.   Strategic Cost optimisation & FinOps

As budget pressures continue through 2025, organisations should seek to leverage cost optimisation opportunities while maintaining the push for resilience, security and agility improvements in an appropriately frugal manner. FinOps is the framework that connects the business to the spending priority on IT capabilities and provides a path for governance and accountability with continuous and iterative practices. With the cloud procurement practices of IT teams often be compared to moving from buying beer by the bottle (on-premises procurement) to the installation of a Tap directly into the bedroom of an alcoholic, it is not surprising that cost control and purchase decision governance will continue to be a big topic for 2025.

7. Renewed focus on energy efficiency and energy security

With energy network stability being a political topic we expect to see a renewed focus on operational resilience planning. Although we don’t expect to see material deployment of new branch infrastructure for this purpose, we do expect that planning cycles will start to take a stronger focus on understanding worker energy requirements and the risks to productivity that may result from grid instability.

8.    Windows 10 End of Life

Retirement or upgrades of Windows 10 devices should be nearing completion, however the impending end of security updates in October 2025 isn't moving for those who haven't completed the task. Undoubtedly there will be some IT functions that cut it close, however windows 10 devices should no longer be an acceptable thing in the environment.

9.  Priority Planning

Deciding what not to do is often just as important on identifying the opportunity landscape. The more that the IT function properly engages with the business the truly limitless appetite for more information, more automation and improved capabilities is increasingly uncovered demonstrating the insatiable demand the business has. Maintaining focus and prioritisation is critical to success in delivering your improvement and remediation projects.

10.  Improved technical governance and further increased board-level oversight of IT operations

The importance of secure, reliable and efficient IT to support the productivity improvements across the businesses will continue to be a focal point for many boards. Data custody has become an increasing concern as increasingly complex supply chain and IT environments threaten to affect the “line of sight” of organisations to its information. Boards will continue to ask questions on their risk levels for data integrity, information protection and privacy compliance. We expect many more organisations will opt for Independent external review to provide appropriate oversight directly to the board.