Cloudy with a Chance of Ransomware: Our 2025 Data Security Forecast

As we continue to fight against cyber threats in 2025, bad actors are continuing to find new ways to test your resilience. Let’s look ahead at some tools, challenges, and new regulations that you should be familiar with as we gear up to keep everything locked down in 2025.

Data Security will be at the Heart of Generative AI Adoption

As we look towards 2025, one critical element stands out in the discourse around the adoption and evolution of generative artificial intelligence: data security. As generative AI models require vast amounts of data to learn and generate content, ensuring this data's privacy, confidentiality, and integrity becomes paramount. Companies that can offer robust data security measures will gain a competitive edge, fostering greater trust among users and partners. This trust translates into market share, as businesses and consumers are more likely to engage with AI solutions that prioritize data protection, aligning with stringent regulations like the EU AI Act, GDPR, or CCPA.

Data security, therefore, isn't just a hurdle for generative AI; it's becoming its driving force. As businesses and consumers alike demand more from AI in terms of capability and security, generative AI's future looks increasingly intertwined with advancements in data protection. By 2025, we predict that data security will not only be a benchmark for success in the AI industry but also a deciding factor for trust and broad-scale AI adoption by industry and consumers.

DORA will Extend Beyond Financial Services

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) was initially enacted to bolster IT security for European financial service institutions. But in 2025, DORA will become more of an operational resilience tool due to its array of processes for risk management, incident reporting, third-party risk management and business continuity management. These processes will help organizations respond to cyber threats, geopolitical tensions, and natural disasters. Indeed, DORA's broader adoption will redefine how all businesses approach operational resilience and continuity in an increasingly unpredictable world, underscoring the urgency of preparation.

AI will become a vital ally in meeting DORA's requirements, revealing new use cases as companies innovate ways to incorporate AI-driven resilience measures in areas like threat detection, response automation, and compliance monitoring. In a landscape that now requires real-time responses, AI will empower organizations to respond to incidents and adapt as situations evolve dynamically.?

To learn more, check out the episode of CISO Conversations below featuring Richard Cassidy and Anna Delaney , who discuss must-know strategies for DORA Compliance.

IT and Security Leaders Must Fortify their Data in the Cloud

Data is the crown jewel of the business—and the cloud is increasingly becoming its castle. But what good is a castle if you leave the drawbridge down? Organizations must prepare for cloud intrusions from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats: the 2024 CrowdStrike Global Threat Report found cloud intrusions have surged by 75% since 2023.

With the cloud’s continued expansion comes an even greater responsibility for organizations to combat vulnerabilities—otherwise, this surge is only the beginning. In 2025, organizations must focus on protecting data in the cloud, monitoring risk, and building confidence that they can recover data and applications in the event of an attack.?

This means going above and beyond app-native security tools and finding tailor-made solutions that not only prevent threats from reaching data in the cloud but also recover swiftly against any threats that sneak across the moat.

Learn more about achieving total cyber resilience in the Cloud with Rubrik here.

Data Security Posture Management Becomes an Essential Element of Cyber Resilience

Data security posture management—DSPM—aims to solve one of the most complex issues in modern cloud environments: knowing where all your data is and how it is secured. As more (and larger) data sets become available for AI models to consume, the likelihood of sensitive data being exposed to unauthorized users increases significantly.

Cloud, AI, and DSPM will go hand in hand because traditional security methods like DLP (Data Loss Prevention) and CNAPP (Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms) alone don't adequately address an organization's overall data-related cyber resilience. See for yourself how Rubrik DSPM can help your organization proactively reduce the risk of data exposure here.

A Wave of AI Agents Will Increase Cyber Resilience—and Introduce New Risks

The emerging agentic AI market shows endless potential, especially for organizations that use the cloud to scale computing power and storage capacity to train and deploy complex AI models. CISOs focusing on cloud-first architectures will reap the benefits of increased productivity, better customer experiences, and more. Agentic AI also has the potential to help businesses keep their data and cloud apps more secure; imagine a future where AI agents automate threat detection while enhancing the speed of response and resilience.

However, if not implemented cautiously, agentic AI will also risk sensitive data in the cloud. As AI agents become more sophisticated and interconnected, they will likely lead to more security vulnerabilities and accidental data leaks. Savvy business and IT leaders will not let this hold them back from adopting agentic AI but rather drive them to establish guardrails, set up stringent data access policies, and clearly communicate organizational best practices.

Learn how Rubrik and Amazon are teaming up to accelerate the development of secure generative AI applications with Rubrik Annapurna for Amazon Bedrock.

Ransomware will continue to evolve and create havoc

If 2024 taught us anything, ransomware isn’t going anywhere—and will continue to be a favorite of bad actors. With the evolution of AI and more data moving to cloud and SaaS-based platforms, attackers can automate and refine their attack strategies, making ransomware even more effective in 2025.?

But it gets worse. We expect Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) to expand beyond malware, offering initial access brokering, data exfiltration, and negotiation services. RaaS platforms will also continue to lower the technical threshold for launching ransomware attacks, which means more individuals or less technically skilled groups can engage in ransomware activities, increasing the volume of attacks. Organizations will need to develop new strategies to contend with this reality.

Ready to tackle 2025 head on? We sure are. Don’t forget to subscribe to Data Security Digest so you never miss an issue…and give us your 2025 predictions by commenting on the original post!

Hungry for more Cyber Resilience Content?

Check out some of these highly recommended reads from Rubrik here:

?? Blog: How to use Rubrik to Secure Your Epic Electronic Health Systems (Read it here)

?? Blog: Burnout in Cybersecurity: A CISO’s Perspective on the Changing Landscape (Read it here)

?? Blog: Rubrik’s FedRAMP Authorization: A New Era of Federal Cyber Recovery and Resilience (Read it here)

?? Blog: Introducing Turbo Threat Hunting: Redefining Cyber Recovery Speed (Read it here)

?? Rubrik’s 2025 Cyber Resilience Awards (Nominate your organization and check out past winners here)

??? Join us at Camp Rubrik: Healthcare! (Register Now)

?? Data Security Decoded with Maria Roat (Listen wherever you get your podcasts)

?? CISO Conversations: What Impact the New EHDS Regulations Have on Healthcare Data (Watch on YouTube)

Rubrik is a cybersecurity company and our mission is to secure the world’s data. Zero Trust Data Security? helps organizations achieve business resilience against cyberattacks, malicious insiders, and operational disruptions. Rubrik Security Cloud, built with a Zero Trust design and powered by machine learning, delivers complete cyber resilience in a single platform across enterprise, cloud, and SaaS. Our platform automates data policy management and enforcement, safeguards sensitive data, delivers data threat analytics and response, and orchestrates rapid cyber and operational recovery.

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