3 network security predictions for 2025

SASE and SSE customer churn

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.

Generative AI-enabled management accelerates

What's a prediction list without a generative AI (GenAI) reference, right? I'll stay on the positive side rather than dwell on the attacker side of the equation. Thinking longer term, the management console for security products is likely to become a GenAI interface in the future. The rate of change in this market is so drastic, I think we'll see meaningful progress toward this in 2025. This doesn't mean we'll get there this year by any stretch. But as the workforce gets younger and, by default, more comfortable working with AI -- and the technology continues to advance -- I think it will happen faster than most think.

An identity acquisition by a network security vendor

I've been expecting a major move in the network security space for a couple of years now, but the combination of an established market and macroeconomic headwinds has conspired to prevent that from happening.

We've seen networking and security continue to converge, and the next area where a key player might make a large bet is in identity. Cisco did this a few years back with Duo, which is now core to its zero-trust story.

For both zero trust and SASE, integrations with identity providers are critical. Privileged access management has become a core use case for many zero-trust network access vendors. Some SASE vendors offer basic single sign-on capabilities already, but most organizations continue to rely on their identity providers. Ultimately, I could see a scenario where a network security vendor looks at the identity market and decides there's enough opportunity to take a chance.

John Grady is a principal analyst at TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group who covers network security. Grady has more than 15 years of IT vendor and analyst experience.

Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.