2024 was a busy year in cyber. DDoS attacks ramped up and continued to cause disruption despite being one of the oldest tricks in the book. SaaS security was top of mind for many organizations, but the vendor landscape remained fragmented. IoT and operational technology security were also a big focus, which I expect to continue in 2025.

We're more than five years into the reimagining of the network security stack from secure access service edge (SASE) and security service edge (SSE), and organizations are at drastically different spots in their journeys.

Many are still in the early stages, working on initial use cases, vendor selection and the fundamentals that come with getting started on such a transformative project. A segment of early adopters is looking to expand on their initial goals -- such as simplifying and strengthening secure access, moving controls to the cloud and so on -- to more sophisticated outcomes. More focus is on experience management and, more recently, how to take the telemetry and data gained from a SASE architecture and use it effectively for threat detection and response.

Another group I'm interested in watching is those who acted early and didn't get what they needed from their initial vendor partners. At last check, research from Informa TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group found that 11% of organizations said they'd consider changing SSE vendors. I think this number will increase in 2025 as organizations evaluate whether their current products and services have delivered the increased efficiency, efficacy and user experiences they initially promised.