Cyber security, whether singly or in tandem with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), dominates enterprise IT investment plans in 2025, according to Informa TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group’s annual spending intentions research.
The research, based on responses from 1,351 IT and business professionals worldwide, found that cyber security outpaces all other categories of initiative, with a dramatic expansion of AI and analytics also climbing in importance. The majority of the organisations surveyed – 28% of which came from the EMEA region – expect to maintain or increase their spending across all major technology categories in 2025, with cyber security most likely to see spending increases, followed by customer experience and application development.
Around three-quarters of respondents in EMEA and North America said they would increase IT investment overall in 2025 compared with 2024. The research was carried out in the third quarter, which is when many organisations are working on their investment plans for the next year.
Generative AI vied with cyber security as an area for investment, with security being an area to which GenAI is being applied more and more. Data management emerged as a related area, for which GenAI leads the investment pack.
In terms of business initiatives, cyber security (49% overall) was well ahead of efforts to reduce costs (36%), improve data analytics and business intelligence (35%), and increase automation of business workflows (35%). Cyber security was top in EMEA (44%) and North America (51%), which might indicate the direction of travel for EMEA. Again under the heading of business initiatives, “improving operational resilience against cyber attacks” stood at 29% for North America and an almost identical 28% in EMEA.
Among the most important IT initiatives for the year, strengthening cyber security tools and processes outdistanced all others by a wide margin at 27% overall (25% for EMEA, 30% for North America), followed by the use of AI and machine learning (16%), and using data analytics for real-time business intelligence and customer insight (14%).
Within cyber security, the survey revealed that zero-trust network access (ZTNA) tops organisations’ plans for most significant cloud security investments in 2025. Firewalls (including next-generation firewalls) are the top target for network security investments, while multifactor authentication is the top identity-related security technology.
In terms of cloud investment planning, respondents identified ZTNA as one of their most significant planned cloud security investments in 2025 (48% versus 41% in 2024). This was followed by cloud data security and data loss prevention (38%), and application programming interface (API) security (37%).
The growth of API usage in recent years to support modern applications and connect various systems and services has sharpened this focus, according to the authors of a report based on the research, Bill Lundell and Christian Perry. This is because API-reliant microservices ecosystems can be complex and difficult to fully secure.
The rise of AI more generally is stark, as shown by the surge of organisations identifying AI as a technology initiative that’s become significantly more important to their future (44% versus 28% last year). It now ranks closely alongside cyber security (59%) and cloud (38%).
“As the AI locomotive steams ahead, organisations are rapidly circling budgets around GenAI technologies to accelerate automation and eliminate inefficiencies across nearly all elements of their IT and business environments,” said Lundell and Perry.
GenAI continues to rise as a target for significant spending, with 53% planning investments in 2025 (up from 46% in 2024).
The dominance of GenAI over other technologies as an investment target in the information management space is another clear indication that organisations are prioritising the technology regardless of their existing AI strategies, said Lundell and Perry. 53% are planning GenAI investments in data management in 2025, up from 46% in 2024.
