5 IT Trends That Will Drive Innovation in 2025

The fundamentals of IT – meaning the core assumptions and goals behind processes like software development and administration – haven’t changed significantly in decades. But IT techniques are evolving rapidly. So are the business challenges and priorities that IT departments must address.

This is why, as we head into 2025, plenty of change is afoot in the realm of IT. Here’s a look at five key IT trends that I expect to predominate in the coming year as IT departments respond to novel challenges while also seeking to unlock new efficiencies.

1) Zero trust becomes the true foundation for authentication

The concept of zero trust – a security model in which no user, application, or service is granted access to IT resources by default – is not exactly new. However, even in organizations that have adopted zero trust for some of their authentication processes, zero trust has often not become fully embedded across all authentication models.

I see 2025 as the year when this will finally change. The ever-expanding scope and complexity of cybersecurity threats mean that old authentication models – ones in which users are deemed trustworthy automatically based on factors like whether they are internal to a network or because they're already logged into another resource or application – simply no longer work in modern environments.

Going forward, expect businesses to discard traditional authentication models in favor of a zero trust approach.

2) Expanded emphasis on data sovereignty and localization

Knowing exactly where your data is stored, a practice known as data sovereignty, has long been important for some businesses – especially as a means of complying with data privacy or security regulations that apply to certain regions or geopolitical jurisdictions.

However, data sovereignty is assuming even greater importance. The main reason is that as more and more companies invest in AI, they’re storing and processing vast quantities of data to train AI models. Controlling where all of that data is stored, as well as who within the company can access it, has become absolutely paramount.

3) Expansion of AI and machine learning in the cloud

In another reflection of the growing importance of AI to businesses, expect to see expanded adoption in 2025 of cloud-based AI and machine learning services.

Many such services are not actually all that new; services like Amazon Rekognition (which provides image and video recognition) have been around for the better part of a decade.

At present, however, businesses are becoming increasingly keen to develop their own AI tools and services rather than merely adopting pre-configured SaaS solutions like GitHub Copilot or Salesforce Einstein. Implementing these services from scratch using a company's own infrastructure would be a very heavy lift – and one that is not likely to prove cost-effective in the long run. For this reason, I believe we'll see heavier adoption of cloud-based AI/ML solutions in 2025.

4) Growing adoption of cloud-native development tools

I also foresee the cloud becoming even more central to the way organizations build and deploy software. While cloud-based development tools such as Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) are not new, we’re just now reaching a point where the idea of doing any kind of development work locally or storing any code on a developer's laptop or PC is becoming arcane.

In 2025 and beyond, expect the software development process – which includes not just coding itself but also design, testing, and deployment – at the typical organization to take place fully in the cloud, using development tools that integrate deeply with cloud platforms.

5) AI-assisted cloud management

As the cloud grows ever more important to the way companies operate, managing all of the cloud services and configurations that businesses depend on is becoming more challenging. To keep pace with the rate of change and complexity, I foresee more and more teams taking advantage of AI-assisted cloud management tools.

I’m referring here to solutions that use AI to help automate and scale processes like application monitoring, cloud configuration management, and incident response. Although humans will always be necessary for addressing truly complex management tasks that AI can't handle reliably, many routine facets of cloud administration can now be mostly or fully automated using AI. Businesses seeking to operate efficiently will want to take advantage of the new breed of AI-powered cloud management tools.

Conclusion

If there’s a common theme that unifies the various 2025 IT trends I laid out above, it's that the world in which IT departments operate is growing increasingly complex. Teams face new security challenges and the need to support new types of workloads (like AI services) and environments that are continuously growing in scale.

This is why I expect 2025 to be a year where IT teams leverage novel types of practices and solutions – like zero trust, tighter control over data sovereignty, and AI-assisted cloud management – to keep up with the complexity. The opportunities I've described above won't just be nice-to-haves; leveraging them will be critical for businesses that want to remain efficient and scalable in the face of constantly evolving challenges.