2025 was a defining year, marking one of the most pivotal periods for IT trends as AI, automation, and infrastructure pressures converged.
AI advanced at an unprecedented pace, often outstripping governance, controls, and the operational know-how needed to use it safely. Data centers hit power and cooling ceilings. Automation shifted from pilot projects to measurable performance tools. And the long-standing assumption that compliance and security move in lockstep was challenged repeatedly as organizations absorbed the cost of inadequate preparation.
Drawing from dozens of conversations with Pellera’s subject-matter experts spanning cybersecurity, AI, analytics, digital infrastructure, and beyond, this recap brings forward recent trends in the IT industry that shaped 2025, and what those trends mean for the road ahead.
For CIOs and CISOs, the IT industry trends of 2025 revealed that progress depends on aligning investment with measurable risk reduction and operational value.
Trend #1: Compliance & Security Finally Parted Ways
For years, organizations treated compliance as a reliable proxy for security. That belief eroded sharply in 2025. Cyber incidents continued to rise even among enterprises with mature compliance programs.
McKinsey’s 2025 outlook noted that equity investment in digital trust and cybersecurity rose to more than $77 billion in 2024, a signal that enterprises recognized the growing gap between documentation and real defense. That trend mirrored what Pellera’s teams saw throughout the year, as more boards began examining whether their compliance activities were actually reducing risk.
Anton Abaya, Cybersecurity Director of Governance, Risk, Compliance, and Cloud Security at Pellera, noted that this growing focus has elevated accountability at the board level. Directors are increasingly expected to understand the difference between being compliant and being secure.
One of the most persistent misconceptions among executives is the belief that compliance equals security. That assumption routinely creates blind spots during threat hunting and incident response. When boards assume that compliance activities automatically map to security outcomes, budgets skew toward reporting instead of risk mitigation.
The prioritization of real defense also drove changes in how organizations structured their programs. Compliance efforts remained important, but enterprises began treating them as an output of strong security rather than the mechanism for achieving it. The companies that saw the fewest disruptions in 2025 were the ones that aligned governance activities with real technical controls, built operational visibility into workflows, and ensured their leadership teams had a realistic understanding of the shared responsibility model across cloud environments.
As Abaya summarized in one conversation, “The board is responsible for cybersecurity and for giving it the attention it needs.” 2025 was the year that message finally began to land.
>> Related Read – Understanding IT Compliance: Why Compliance Doesn’t Equal Security
Trend #2: Automation Proved Its Worth
Automation has lingered at the edge of IT transformation for years, but 2025 delivered notable progress. After a long stretch of inflated expectations, automation became quantifiable.
A recent analysis found that organizations adopting generative-AI-assisted security automation saw a 30% reduction in mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) for security incidents. This is a meaningful improvement supported by real operational outcomes. Pellera’s Managed Services team reported similar outcomes, with security operations centers (SOCs) relying on automation to cut alert fatigue and accelerate triage.
Paul Thompson, Managed Security Services Solutions Architect at Pellera, noted that he saw “a lot of expectations around automation, sometimes called active response,” describing how teams were beginning to shift from manual intervention models toward workflows that eliminate repetitive tasks and surface meaningful anomalies.
Alex Barroso, Solutions Architect & Product Manager at Pellera, reinforced that adoption curve, explaining that customer expectations rose sharply as AI-driven operations became more widespread. Despite this enthusiasm, he frequently cautioned organizations that automation requires standardization first. As he pointed out, “Customers thought AI would automate absolutely everything from day one, but you have to standardize the environment and processes first.”
Automation succeeded where teams invested in foundational readiness. Enterprises that expected automation to replace talent largely saw disappointing results, while those that treated automation as an augmentation strategy gained significant operational efficiency. The most resilient organizations used automation to remove noise, not replace expertise — a distinction that became increasingly clear throughout the year.
Trend #3: AI’s Promise Met Its First Reality Check
Of all the current trends in IT industry conversations this past year, perhaps none were buzzier than AI. Most trends in the IT industry in 2025 revealed both the promise and the pressure created by rapid AI adoption. McKinsey found that nearly 90 percent of enterprises now use AI in at least one business function, yet measurable ROI remained inconsistent. Pellera’s experts pointed to a common theme: Enterprises underestimated the governance, data quality, and observability requirements that AI systems depend on.
Here’s where that breakdown showed up most:
- Chase value, not activity. Dr. Jonathan Gough, Chief Scientist & Senior Director AI/ML at Pellera, noted that “AI is technology to help you save money or make money” and experimentation without standards often creates the illusion of progress.
- Reduce GenAI noise. Teams jumped into accessible tools without strategy, creating what Gough called “noise that feels productive but does not generate value.”
- Support agentic systems. These models interpret context and adapt in real time, which means they require clean data and strong observability to perform reliably.
- Tighten governance early. Salah Mokhayesh, Data Governance Lead at Pellera, saw how small inconsistencies spread quickly through advanced models, exposing weaknesses in unstructured AI programs.
A clear pattern emerged over the course of 2025. Organizations that implemented structured AI roadmaps, measurable use cases, and consistent governance moved faster and saw tangible value. AI’s story this year was defined by operational maturity rather than experimentation.
Trend #4: Infrastructure Hit Its Limits
As AI workloads intensified, infrastructure constraints became impossible to ignore. Several Pellera experts predicted this earlier in the year, pointing to IT trends in compute demands, energy consumption, and the rising cost of cloud operations. By mid-2025, their predictions were visible in nearly every vertical.
According to Gartner, more than 90 percent of CIOs said that managing cost limits their ability to get value from AI. As these AI workloads grew, organizations began reassessing where their compute should live.
George Shearer, Pellera’s Team Lead – Accelerated Compute, described the shift as a natural response to data gravity and rising operational costs, explaining that enterprises realized they would “have to consume this technology on-prem” to balance performance with sustainability.
Power and cooling demands became a central concern. Shearer was blunt in his assessment that “the current electric grid cannot possibly support all of this new demand,” and that guidance proved accurate. Data centers reached thermal and capacity limits faster than many organizations anticipated.
The result was a renewed emphasis on hybrid architectures and on-prem acceleration as infrastructure economics shifted in response to AI proliferation, even as cloud architectures remained critical to overall strategy.
This trend also triggered broader architectural conversations. Enterprises revisited workload placement strategies, energy budgets, cooling requirements, and sustainability commitments. Hybrid cloud became the default, not a transitional phase, with interoperability emerging as a competitive differentiator.
Trend #5: Data Strategy Became the Common Denominator
Across verticals, our experts felt that data strategy influenced success more than any other factor in 2025. Naturally, this makes it one of the trending topics in the IT industry worth following right now.
Michael Sauter, Lead Data Engineer at Pellera, emphasized that proper readiness depends on leadership’s willingness to commit “both with whatever hardware and services, and people that they need to modernize.” Organizations with unified architectures consistently outperformed those still battling fragmentation.
As teams reflected on the current trends in the IT industry, several foundational practices emerged as essential for strengthening data strategy in the year ahead:
- Use synthetic data to unlock experimentation. Mokhayesh described synthetic datasets as “near-perfect identical reproduction of production-level data” that let teams test ideas without exposing sensitive records.
- Scale governance with AI assistance. Metadata, lineage, and naming standards became easier to manage as teams shifted from manual stewardship to AI-powered classification and rule generation.
- Break down operational silos. Mokhayesh’s call for “one organization, one leadership” reflected how coordinated stewardship prevents conflicting definitions and inconsistent pipelines.
- Modernize with intention. Sauter stressed that analytics modernization accelerates only when hardware, services, and staffing are aligned under a single strategic plan.
Time and time again, we saw that the organizations that unified their data practices were the ones who moved with greater speed, safety, and confidence.
>> Related Read – How to Build a Strong Data Protection Program for Your Business
The Year Strategy Finally Caught Up to Technology
2025 pushed IT leaders to do more than chase the latest and buzziest tools. Progress came when organizations paired investment with intention: aligning AI to specific business outcomes, building stronger data foundations, treating security as a design principle, and tuning automation to amplify, rather than overwhelm, their teams.
As you look ahead to 2026, the lesson is hopefully simple. By better understanding the IT industry trends of 2025, creating a roadmap for stronger alignment, agility, and accountability in 2026 should be that much easier. Remember, the organizations that move fastest next year will be the ones that treat these 2025 insights as input to a concrete strategy, not just a retrospective.
Ready to apply these lessons to your 2026 strategy? Pellera helps you turn reflection into transformation.
