2025 Top 5 Cybersecurity & Automation Trends

Networks and digital resilience are evolving fast. Technology leaders will steer their investment, innovation, and threat mitigation strategies accordingly, leveraging AI and critical services like DDI. EfficientIP describes 5 cybersecurity & automation trends we see for 2025.

With everything becoming AI-driven, IT infrastructures and digital resilience are evolving fast. So how will business and technology leaders steer their investment, innovation, and threat mitigation strategies in the forthcoming months? How will they make best use of critical services such as DDI (DNS-DHCP-IPAM) to make sure their IT initiatives succeed? As we go deeper into the AI era, here are 5 key cybersecurity & automation trends that EfficientIP foresees for 2025:

1. Network modernization focus will shift to software-driven networks incorporating simplified management & automation

Current Situation

To keep up with ever-increasing complexity led by proliferation of IoT devices, SaaS apps, and hybrid work environments, I&O teams are trying to modernize their networks, while at the same time having to deal with technology debt. According to an Accenture study, a staggering 64% of companies today face significant risks due to network deficiencies. 

What’s Required

For businesses to stay competitive, their networks now need to provide seamless experiences on simplified, highly-scalable infrastructure. IT modernization focus is therefore shifting to software features that enable turnkey automation, enhance security, and simplify network management. Networking platforms must offer a centralized single-pane-of-glass experience, offering end-to-end visibility and enabling AIOps – to help simplify operations, improve network performance, and strengthen security posture.

How DDI Helps

DDI enables network modernization, empowering network and security teams to scale their networks and respond to ever-evolving challenges. EfficientIP’s DDI offers real-time network visibility through intelligent monitoring and automates key processes with self-service provisioning so ITOps teams can streamline operations and maintain a secure, compliant, resilient network. An extended Network Source of Truth (NSoT), combined with open APIs, enables intelligent automation of DNS and DHCP services, ensuring secure, policy-driven deployment and unified management across hybrid multicloud environments​. Comprehensive, built-in DNS security protects networks against complex threats, and helps organizations advance their zero trust strategies.

2. Increasingly widespread AI-powered attacks will boost cybersecurity investment in AI-driven threat intelligence

Current Situation

Cybercrime is predicted to cost $12 trillion in 2025 (Forrester), with dark large language models (LLMs) and the use of generative AI by hackers making cyberthreats more frequent, sophisticated, and difficult to detect. 84% of respondents in a recent Keeper survey said phishing and smishing are harder to detect due to hackers’ use of AI tools, while 42% said AI-powered phishing attacks are their top AI security concern. 

What’s Required

With DORA looming and NIS2 still top-of-mind, organizations need to adopt advanced AI-based cybersecurity measures to stay ahead of evolving threats by leveraging AI’s ability  to detect, predict, and prevent threats in real-time. CISOs are increasingly leveraging AI tools to analyze network traffic patterns, enabling anomalies which were previously missed to now be identified. AI technologies bring new capabilities around vulnerability alerts and threat detection/response, empowering security teams to automate real time monitoring, minimize false positives, and predict forthcoming cyber threats.

How DDI Helps

With IDC stating that DNS attacks target 90% of organizations for DDoS, phishing, ransomware etc., Protective DNS Security has become essential for both keeping the network secure and functional, as well as for meeting NIS2 risk management and incident handling obligations. To  elevate threat detection, EfficientIP’s innovative AI-based technologies  provide a key advantage to quickly identify DGAs and phishing  using ML-driven image recognition,  NLP, and unsupervised clustering models. Our technologies  help create a DNS-centric threat intelligence, continuously updated with malicious domain data for preemptive network protection.

3. Hybrid multiclouds will rely more heavily on unified management platforms to enhance operational efficiency and automation

Current Situation

Edge computing and the growth of 5G and IoT have amplified hybrid multicloud architecture complexity. Organizations are struggling to manage data from several platforms, each with its own set of tools and data formats. This, together with lack of unified visibility across on-premise and multicloud setups, leads to a range of issues, including inefficient use of resources, uncontrolled shadow IT practices, limited scalability of network automation, and compliance risks.

What’s Required

To keep control of their infrastructure while managing the increasing complexity and demands of hybrid multicloud environments, organizations will look to adopt advanced strategies and tools in two key areas. Firstly, they will likely invest heavily in unified management platforms to centralize operations, monitoring, and governance. Secondly, they will increase automation across hybrid and multicloud environments. These measures, when combined, bring enhanced visibility across all clouds and enable organizations to operate at speed and scale. Importantly, Network Source of Truth (NSoT) and data quality will be key to successful Cloud Ops.

How DDI Helps

DDI helps IT teams navigate these complex environments by providing the holistic network view needed to simplify, automate, and secure network management across hybrid multicloud. EfficientIP’s DDI discovers and presents on a unified management interface all network assets connected to different cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, Meraki…) and then keeps the data accurate and up-to-date. Leveraging IPAM as an effective NSoT containing legitimate, authoritative data provides a solid foundation for scaling and accelerating network automation initiatives such as firewall policy and rule automation or resource lifecycle management. 

4. Organizations will look to full-stack observability for proactive network management and cybersecurity

Current Situation

As networks grow rapidly in both size and complexity, legacy monitoring tools are insufficient for consistent network management, threat detection, and network protection. IT teams are especially struggling to analyze exponentially growing data, and they have to cope with tool sprawl inhibiting their understanding of application or service usage. As a result, critical network management activities have become extremely time-consuming in a world where NetOps and SecOps teams need to act quickly. 

What’s Required

Organizations will more and more adopt modern observability solutions that transcend traditional monitoring tools and are essential for proactive network management and cybersecurity. They collect, store, and process massive amounts of real-time, actionable data from multiple sources, and enhance it with innovative algorithms, ML or AI for deeper insights from a single pane of glass. This offers proactive insights, automated analytics, and actionable intelligence, crucial for maintaining health and security of your network. Extending to full-stack observability gives you end-to-end visibility across not only the application layer but also the infrastructure, database, and network layers. With this you know what’s going on with your applications and infrastructure performance, and can quickly get to the root cause whenever there’s an issue.

How DDI Helps

To understand where and why network issues are occurring, you need insights into your DDI infrastructure and related traffic. DDI observability is strategic to achieving full-stack observability. It provides real-time, contextual, and actionable analytics that improve operational efficiency, network performance, and security posture. EfficientIP DDI Observability helps NOC and SOC teams quickly detect and investigate operational or security anomalies. This allows fast problem-solving, streamlines network operations, increases productivity, and ensures business resilience while delivering an optimal user experience.

5. Shared goals of agility, cybersecurity, and operational excellence will drive DevNetSecOps Collaboration

Current Situation

Many development, network, and security teams are working with siloed processes, thus elevating potential risks. Without alignment, there’s a higher risk of non-compliance with regulations (DORA, NIS2, GDPR …), as development might release code without suitable security checks, network teams might fail to include adequate controls, and security might neglect to enforce necessary policies. Other issues being reported by IT teams concern scalability and resilience limitations, delayed incident response, lack of end-to-end-security, and higher operational costs.

What’s Required

To ensure that IT systems remain secure, resilient, and compliant, collaboration will shift to a holistic “DevNetSecOps” culture. Development, network, and security teams will share responsibilities ranging from design to deployment, driven by common goals of agility, security, and operational excellence. Unified platforms, automation, and AI-driven insights will be pivotal for collaboration, helping identify risks early, mitigating threats quickly, and enabling more secure, scalable, and performant solutions. This unified approach reduces vulnerabilities, accelerates incident response, and ultimately contributes to your organization’s overall digital resilience

How DDI Helps

By providing a foundation for automation, visibility, and security, DDI enables NetDevOps, NetSecOps, or DevSecOps teams to work together more efficiently, reducing friction, enhancing security, and accelerating the delivery of reliable applications and services. As an example, DDI systems can integrate with DevOps and IaC tools (e.g. Ansible, Jenkins, Terraform), enabling automated provisioning and decommissioning of IP resources as part of deployment workflows. Or role-based access and detailed logging in DDI systems can help security teams enforce governance while allowing DevOps teams to innovate.

Key Takeaways

For networking and security teams, 2025 promises to be another interesting year, juggling modernization and innovation with automation, security and AI initiatives. To learn more about how EfficientIP’s DDI Solutions can help you align with cybersecurity & automation trends to better control your IT infrastructure, feel free to contact one of our Network Automation and Security experts.