2025 Trends and Challenges from Cortex Leadership

As we prepare to say goodbye to 2024, the state of security operations continues to evolve and adapt as organizations face increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and early signs of cybercriminal adoption of AI. Current solutions often rely on siloed tools, and manual processes are proving inadequate in addressing the complexity and scale of modern threats. According to Unit 42, the time between initial compromise and data exfiltration is decreasing, and attackers are sometimes beginning to exfiltrate data in hours, not days. What does that mean for 2025?

Security Operations Predictions for 2025

Prediction 1: Unified Security Operation Center (SOC) and Cloud Security Platforms Will Set the Standard for Stopping Attacks Across Entire Enterprises

As cloud adoption accelerates, so do attacks against it. Cyber adversaries are enhancing their tactics, outpacing the capabilities of DevSecOps and security teams to rapidly shutdown threats. Today’s disparate and manual approaches to cloud security and security operations result in response times that stretch into days, while attacks unfold in minutes.

To combat this challenge, we anticipate that organizations will adopt security operations platforms that deliver natively integrated capabilities from code to cloud to SOC where the customer doesn't have to figure out the integration and the utilization.

A platform approach provides comprehensive visibility. Shared context across the entire enterprise cloud and SOC teams will establish a single source of truth that enables swift, coordinated risk management and threat response across both cloud-native and on-premises environments. This unified approach also benefits the culture. For the first time, organizations will be able to break down silos and significantly enhance their ability to collaborate with shared data and tools.

Prediction 2: The SOC Plays a Larger Role in Managing Exposures

The current approach of SOC tools that focuses on identifying and prioritizing alerts will increasingly become outdated as AI-driven solutions gain traction and enable automatic remediation. With the speed, scale and sophistication of attacks today, we anticipate organizations will demand SOC solutions that are more autonomous. As part of this shift, the next security domain where we expect SOC teams to leverage AI is exposure management. Driven by AI, the SOC will increasingly play a larger role in managing exposures via identifying, assessing and remediating threats in near real time.

The current reality is that many solutions in the market today can inform organizations that they have 5,000 security alerts and even prioritize them by severity; however, this doesn't resolve the issues or improve the organization's security posture. They still have 5,000 alerts to manage.

Implementing AI takes massive steps forward through automatic remediation of those thousands of alerts, and as the models learn, they can ensure that the same alerts don’t happen twice. By reducing reliance on manual alert prioritization, organizations can continuously enhance their security posture, improve response times, and better protect their assets in an increasingly complex threat landscape.

Prediction 3: AI Revolutionizes the SOC — Redefining Human Analyst’s Role

As cyberthreats become more sophisticated, traditional security solutions struggle to keep pace. In response, organizations are turning to AI-powered security platforms to enhance their security operations. The shift toward AI-driven security operations centers is already proving transformative, offering increased efficiency and more effective threat detection. In the Palo Alto Networks SOC, our analysts used to spend most of their day triaging alerts, but after AI and automation led to 100% alert coverage, the same analysts now spend 70% of their day threat hunting and running attack simulations, tasks that are far more engaging and enjoyable.

This evolution does not signal a reduced need for human security practitioners. Instead, it will redefine their role, focusing analysts on higher-level tasks as AI handles more routine operations like vulnerability scanning, threat detection and prioritization. As AI matures, it will increasingly function as an AI SOC analyst, working hand-in-hand with human analysts to scale their efforts, significantly improving the speed and effectiveness of security operations. This new collaboration between human analysts and AI will drive significant gains in SOC productivity, elevating the role of security professionals and allowing them to play a more central role in shaping their organizations' security strategy.

Staying Strong in 2025

The security operations market is ripe for disruption as organizations struggle to stay ahead of adversaries. 2025 will be the year the AI-powered SOC makes significant headway as organizations realize the SOC can be stronger, more effective, and a happier place to work. At Palo Alto Networks, we're dedicated to driving this transformation, helping organizations tackle evolving challenges with solutions that deliver tangible, real-world results.

To discover more insights for the coming year, see our 7 game-changing predictions for 2025 from Palo Alto Networks.