ManageEngine’s Top 6 strategic priorities for enterprises in 2025 By: Rajesh Ganesan, President, ManageEngine

Significant technological enhancements have been made in 2024 to address business needs. Organizations have broadened their perspectives, shed age-old practices, and embraced novelties to strengthen their foothold in the market. With the technological landscape evolving each year, enterprises are compelled to look into various aspects of their businesses and understand their contribution to overall growth.

One of the most prominent examples of this is the significant progress achieved by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the technology and AI industry. And according to the “State of AI in Saudi Arabia” report, issued by the Saudi Data & AI Authority (SDAIA) the total attracted funds in Saudi AI companies reached $1.7 billion in 2023 as indicated by Crunchbase data, and in terms of AI infrastructure, the Kingdom ranked second in the Middle East in terms of the number of colocation data centers, with 22 active ones and 40 under development.

ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corporation and a leading provider of enterprise IT management solutions, has identified six key priorities for 2025 that modern organizations should consider to navigate through the challenging digital landscape. These priorities include scaling up AI usage, democratizing cybersecurity, implementing a distributed governance model for compliance, reengineering experiences, embracing sustainability, and focusing on outcome-driven IT.

Democratizing cybersecurity:

Managing cyber risks at all levels of the workforce—and not restricting it to just the top organizational level—should be a priority for security leaders in 2025. This involves the democratization of cybersecurity, which essentially makes everyone in an organization responsible for its defense. While there are some obvious benefits associated with this, such as proactive security management and increased cyber resilience, businesses also stand to benefit by way of cost savings, increased efficiency, and innovation in security practices.

Organizations should ensure employees undergo continuous security engagement programs, which are different from the usual annual training sessions. Employees should also have access to the appropriate self-service tools and services. This becomes crucial since the biggest challenge to democratizing security is poorly equipped employees and ill-defined processes.

Distributed govemance model for compliance

Multiple regulations and their related, year-round audits will soon force privacy and compliance leaders to implement a distributed compliance framework to ensure pervasive compliance. The general practice so far has been to entrust compliance to a central team; however, the job is intrinsic to every department within an organization.

The central compliance team is primarily responsible for program management. It should have a pulse of what’s happening in the industry and map the requirements evolving out of relevant regulations and standards. This central compliance team should keep leadership updated about the evolving landscape and macro challenges posed.

On the other hand, execution of the compliance program should be broad, empowering business functions at all levels. Each team and business function should understand risk management and use it consistently to address non-conformities flagged during audits as well as for root cause analysis of incidents.

Specific attention should be paid to training people across various business functions. This allows a better governance model to evolve because stakeholders don’t view compliance as an impediment but as an aid in growing business. A distributed framework also ensures that controls are not overengineered. Likewise, processes are more in tune with business practicalities and don’t degenerate into a set of tasks without any practical relevance. Finally, friction is reduced between the central compliance function and other business functions.

Reengineering experiences:

In any organization, customers and employees are regarded as the most valuable assets. Every single interaction they have, be it with either a human or a machine, is critical in shaping their overall experience. These experiences are crucial in determining the fate of an organization, making them a strategic priority for leadership.

With expectations evolving and technology advancing, reengineering experiences for users is instrumental in accelerating business transformation and sustenance. Ease of use, availability, consistency, being proactive with changes, contactless digital experiences, and keeping the feedback loop open are some key user expectations that can’t be ignored. This approach involves reimagining and redesigning an organization’s existing technology architecture, which may have scalability and compatibility issues, to deliver better than before. It also includes leveraging emerging technologies such as AI, generating actionable insights from data analytics platforms, customizing workflows, and enabling multi-modal interactions.

Major challenges to reengineering include context setting—the size of the enterprise and the productivity hit taken during the shift. Another challenge would be ensuring IT security while at the same time ensuring those measures don’t hinder or impact the user experience. However, reengineering ultimately fulfills the primary purpose of the business by enhancing employee engagement and customer satisfaction.

Outcome-driven IT:

Modern-day enterprises are powered by IT, which now occupies a place at the top of the management table. Any failure that results in services being unavailable or disrupted can result in huge business implications. Yet, in some quarters, IT is still considered a cost center rather than a contributor to business profits.

IT leaders will need to clearly demonstrate the value generated by their IT investments or risk shrinking budgets. While dashboards provide metrics that point to the operational performance of a technology, they don’t always present a clear case for the business benefits derived. That clarity can be gained by aligning IT with not only operational efficiency but also with business velocity and opportunity costs. In 2025, CIOs need to closely focus on KPIs and metrics that provide a direct link to the business outcomes that depend on them. For instance, in the healthcare industry where there is constant focus on safeguarding data and compliance management, metrics that track user behavior and anomalies, ensure continuous availability of critical assets, and give visibility into critical and high-risk vulnerabilities and incidents are most vital since they all affect business operations.

Scaling up AI usage:

The pursuit of digital maturity is reshaping how businesses are operating, and AI is playing a pivotal role in it. The past couple of years were significant for AI as a lot of enterprises ran pilots to harness its capabilities. As we approach 2025, enterprises will view AI integration from the lens of scaling up its usage and generating ROI.

It will also be a big year for AI in cybersecurity. With attacks becoming more sophisticated by leveraging AI, traditional cybersecurity measures may not be enough to defend against them. This is where investing in AI for defense becomes crucial. Investing in augmented AI is also becoming increasingly important as it can significantly enhance employee productivity. Additionally, we can expect to see more LLMs being utilized in the enterprise setting. These LLMs will be equipped with agents that can make real-time API calls and augment their generative capabilities.

To realize all this, it’s crucial for companies to have a solid data strategy in place. This includes streamlining relevant processes and ensuring that they are in sync with that strategy. CIOs must prioritize data sovereignty and data preparation—operating on encrypted data—to guarantee the success of AI implementation.

Embracing sustainability:

Investments into GPUs are skyrocketing as they play a critical role in training deep learning models and supporting faster computing. However, their energy requirements, which are difficult to maintain and constitute massive carbon footprints, call for immediate intervention.

In the digital world, a sustainable outlook reduces the environmental damage inflicted by such advanced technologies, meets the demands of environmentally conscious customers, helps adhere to compliance standards, and improves efficiency, making it a key competitive differentiator and a strategic priority for organizations in 2025.

Regardless of the challenges involved in incorporating sustainability into existing business operations, organizations can still embrace it by conducting internal environmental audits, raising their investments to explore alternate energy sources, and gaining carbon credits.

By strategically prioritizing the above aspects, enterprises will be empowered to secure their business posture, gain competitive advantage, and enhance their operational efficiency in the ever-changing digital ecosystem.