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TL;DR

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• Minimal growth in cybersecurity budgets will drive vendor consolidation and platformization as businesses look to reduce costs and simplify operations.
• The focus on systemic cyber events will increase as organizations, following the steps of insurers, recognize the ripple effects these incidents can have on the supply chain and market stability.
• Cyber risk quantification (CRQ) insights will be integrated into third-party risk management tools, helping teams prioritize mitigation efforts based on the financial impact vulnerabilities will have. 
• Governments worldwide will adopt or enhance cybersecurity regulations, requiring stricter adherence to risk management best practices.
• More countries will mandate material cyber incident reporting, pushing organizations to develop data-driven thresholds to streamline this reporting process and compelling boards to work more closely with their CISOs.
• The number of cyber MGAs will consolidate, with only the most adaptable and tech-forward surviving in the competitive landscape.
• Generative AI will lower the cost of cyberattacks, increasing automation and forcing CISOs to adopt more advanced, AI-driven defenses.
• The volume and sophistication of lower-level AI-powered attacks will rise, challenging businesses to adapt their cybersecurity strategies.
• With their current cost-efficiency and automation, CRQ will see higher adoption among mid-sized and large enterprises, providing accurate, data-informed insights to bolster resilience and decision-making.

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Preparing for the Future of Cyber Demands Continuous Vigilance

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The evolution of the cyber risk management landscape is constant, and with each passing year, market players find themselves in the position of having to readjust their strategies, whether in brand positioning, cybersecurity, or beyond, to account for these consequent changes. While some of the shifts are welcome, others are less so. Nevertheless, all require careful foresight.

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Only by looking ahead and planning, as much as possible, for this future can business executives ensure the market remains stable amid increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks, growing compliance demands, and a volatile economy.

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As 2025 approaches, there are already some prominent cyber risk management trends starting to emerge that every cybersecurity leader should be aware of. 

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1. Vendor Consolidation and Cybersecurity Platformization

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Cybersecurity budgets grew minimally in 2024, and although Forrester found that more than half of surveyed global security technology leaders expect a budget increase in 2025, this growth is minimal, with over 80% admitting that they did not anticipate a bump of more than 10%.

Given this discouraging economic reality, chief information security officers (CISOs) and other heads of cybersecurity will no doubt look to review their current technological stacks and find opportunities to combine capabilities via vendor consolidation. With consolidation, organizations can not only minimize their costs but also, arguably more importantly, simplify data management and visibility, allowing teams to detect and combat threats more efficiently.

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Vendors, simultaneously keeping up with this adaptation, will continue to platformize and enhance their tools suites, offering more comprehensive solutions that can provide enterprises the plethora of cyber risk management capabilities they need to maintain resilience. Moreover, while some global corporations will make these upgrades internally, many providers will platformize through M&As despite the investment market showing signs of recovery.

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Business Insight: Understanding the Implications

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As CISOs move forward, it’s crucial for them to assess the risk that comes along with consolidation efforts. Relying on a single vendor optimizes many processes and can reduce costs upfront. 

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However, it also creates a single point of failure, meaning that if the organization fell victim to a cyber attack, more critical systems would be compromised. As a result, cybersecurity leaders must leverage cyber risk quantification (CRQ) to determine whether this consolidation is, indeed, worth it from an economic standpoint. 

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2. Systemic Events Grow as a Corporate Concern, Following Insurers

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A decade ago, insurers were already focused on systemic cyber events, enlisting analytic and modeling firms to estimate potential losses and assess vulnerabilities across industries in an attempt to better manage their exposure in case one of these events ever occurred.

But in light of recent global incidents, such as the 2023 MOVEit Data Breach and 2024 CrowdStrike Business Outage, corporations have also started to become attuned to the impact these far-reaching cyber events can have, not only on an individual business but also as they ripple through the supply chain and destabilize entire markets.

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Consequently, in 2025, corporations are going to place a greater emphasis on leveraging multi-model cyber risk analytics to anticipate and plan for these third-party service provider risks, recognizing that their resilience is crucial for both internal stability and the wider business ecosystem.

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3. Integration of CRQ Into Third-Party Cyber Risk Management Dashboards

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As organizations continue to migrate their various operations to the cloud, tools like Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) and Asset and Vulnerability Management have become invaluable for providing the necessary visibility into their security postures, quickly highlighting issues such as system misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. 

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Unfortunately, due to the immense amount of data these tools assess, they often leave security teams with more questions than answers about how to prioritize mitigation efforts. To help their customers contextualize this data, as is undoubtedly necessary, cybersecurity service providers will make a concerted effort to integrate reliable CRQ models into their dashboards, enabling cybersecurity practitioners to understand the impact such threats may have and focus resources accordingly. 

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Instead of being paralyzed by data overload, users can then take targeted actions based on quantified financial outcomes to enhance their overall cybersecurity posture more strategically and cost-effectively. 

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Major cybersecurity vendors will also begin to incorporate reliable cyber risk quantification models as a means to highlight the benefits of various suite package upgrades. Indeed, the majority of these major cyber providers offer tiered solutions, allowing them to leverage quantifications to demonstrate a customer’s return on investment for purchasing a more advanced package. 

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4. More Nations Embrace Cybersecurity Regulations

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In 2025, business leaders should expect that cybersecurity regulations will be adopted, implemented, or, in the case that they already exist, upgraded by their governments. For one, government entities specifically are one of the most targeted industries, with external state-sponsored malicious activity being reported across the globe. Governmental bodies worldwide, therefore, recognize the imperative of strict regulations to protect their states’ valuable assets and will pass more legislation accordingly.

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Similarly, national regulators are beginning to understand the impact that cyber events can have on their economies, further motivating them to craft robust policies mandating that organizations demonstrate cyber risk management best practices. For instance, with several major Australian companies having suffered from monumental data breaches in recent years, such as Latitude, whose breach affected more than 14 million customers, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) has opted to place an even greater emphasis on cybersecurity.

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APRA’s Prudential Standard CPS 230, set to commence in July 2025, demands that cyber risk be treated just as any other operational risk, meaning business stakeholders must maintain resilience in the wake of cyber incidents and proactively manage this risk through a formal management policy. CPS 230 is hardly the only cybersecurity regulation that has appeared in recent years, with others coming from the EU (NIS 2, DORA) and the US SEC. Businesses not yet subject to such standards, however, should expect to face them sooner rather than later. 

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Business Insight: Increasing Board-Level Engagement

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The heightened governmental regulations will impel board members and other senior stakeholders to collaborate more closely with their CISOs to stay aware of the organization’s cyber risk management programs and what the cyber team is doing to mitigate exposure. To ensure that these non-technical executives have a tangible understanding, CISOs can leverage CRQ, translating cyber terms into a broader business financial language that resonates clearly and, therefore, influences high-level risk management decisions, supporting compliance efforts.  

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5. Countries Increasingly Demand Material Cyber Incident Reporting

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As a component of these new and enhanced national cybersecurity policies, regulators will increasingly require that organizations disclose extreme or “material” cyber events. In the past, businesses preferred to keep these types of incidents under wraps, notifying only those they deemed to be the relevant parties, who, in some cases, were not even the customers. However, with this pattern becoming more frequent, governments decided to intervene.

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For instance, the US SEC now demands that corporations publicly disclose if they have fallen victim to a “material” cyber incident, aiming to provide investors, stakeholders, and other related individuals with an in-depth understanding of the event, including the financial losses and operational damages incurred. The EU’s NIS 2 likewise demands that entities report any cyber attack that causes a “significant” impact, reinforcing this accountability.

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Regulators believe that businesses have an obligation to share these types of incidents due to the resounding market effect they can potentially cause. Public awareness of such events ensures that stakeholders are better informed, stock options are priced fairly, and companies are held to a higher standard of transparency and risk management.

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Business Insight: Quantifying Materiality for Streamlined Reporting

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Determining whether a cyber event has caused a “material” or “significant” impact is a nuanced process that requires executives to evaluate the myriad of damages the organization has suffered in the wake of an event, not least of which includes financial expenses, outage times, and number of data records compromised. To streamline the decision-making process, business leaders should establish quantified thresholds that, if surpassed, most likely indicate that the event can be deemed material and should, therefore, be disclosed. 

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6. Consolidation of Cyber Managing General Agents (MGAs)

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As the demand for fully integrated insurance and cybersecurity solutions continues to rise, the number of cyber Managing General Agents (MGAs) focused on the small to mid-market sector has surged. These MGAs provide critical services by combining underwriting expertise with advanced risk assessment tools to create comprehensive cybersecurity coverage solutions, helping smaller businesses that may lack the resources to mitigate cyber risk independently and offering them the custom support that bridges gaps in both insurance and cyber needs.

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However, this rapid growth, amid a highly competitive landscape combined with the pressure for profitability, is going to lead to consolidation. Only the most adaptable and technologically equipped MGAs are going to endure, distinguishing themselves by their ability to evaluate and differentiate between poor and high-quality cyber risks. Those unable to achieve such standards may pivot into full carriers or, more likely, merge with established insurers seeking to bolster their cybersecurity portfolios.

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This consolatory shift will reshape the market in notable ways, enhancing the quality and reliability of services offered as the more capable MGAs emerge stronger, armed with more accurate and precise insights. At the same time, it may also narrow the field of independent providers, potentially limiting choices for businesses. 

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7. Generative AI Lowers the Cost of Cyber Attacks, Increases Automation

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In 2025, generative AI will redefine the economics of cyber crime, dramatically reducing both the costs and barriers associated with launching sophisticated attacks. With AI tools such as ChatGPT, other large language models (LLMs), and one-time password (OTP) bots, cyber criminals can automate and scale many components of their campaigns, rendering them much more precise and targeted to bypass dated security measures.

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Making these advancements all the more alarming is how easily generative AI has proven itself to be adaptable to different environments, effectively countering traditional defense-in-depth approaches that organizations have long relied upon.

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Fortunately, the same technology that empowers malicious cyber attackers can and must be harnessed not only as a reactive defense strategy but also as a proactive force. AI will help CISOs better predict, detect, and respond to these sophisticated threats. Leveraging AI to automate defense mechanisms and adapt to evolving attack vectors will be crucial to maintaining an effective security posture as generative AI reshapes the threat landscape.

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8. Proliferation of the Volume and Sophistication of Lower Level Attacks

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The relative ease and cost of these automated, AI-powered attacks will inevitably see an increase in the frequency and sophistication of lower-level attacks, such as phishing scams, challenging businesses of all sizes across sectors worldwide. While, individually, these types of incidents will not typically result in catastrophic consequences, collectively, they have the potential to cause significant damage and market disruption.

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These attacks, which will leverage various types of AI capabilities such as voice spoofing and deepfake, will be especially threatening to organizations that have not yet adapted their cybersecurity strategies to account for this advanced technology. The sheer volume and variety of attacks alone will test the resilience of these businesses and expose the gaps in their security practices.

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In 2025, cybersecurity leaders can no longer afford to ignore the implications AI will have on the organization’s bottom line. Upgrading their cybersecurity strategies to account for this world-changing technology and implementing AI-driven threat detection and response systems that mirror the sophistication of the attacks themselves is essential. Failure to do so could result in increased financial losses from persistent, evolving cyber threats that erode revenue and escalate mitigation costs.

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9. High CRQ Adoption Across Mid-Sized to Enterprise-Level Companies

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In the early days of cyber risk quantification, cyber risk managers leveraged static frameworks, such as FAIR, taking advantage of the structured guidelines to assess their organizations’ cyber risks and assigning quantitative values to them in an attempt to develop a risk-based cybersecurity roadmap. While these early frameworks undoubtedly pioneered the way for modern CRQ solutions, they quickly proved themselves to be way too resource-intensive to adopt at scale, requiring considerable manual work to complete. 

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Indeed, because of the time it takes to run an analysis using these frameworks, outputs are typically obsolete by the time they’re rendered, dissuading many enterprise risk leaders in need of developing a customized, data-driven cybersecurity strategy away from implementation and preventing CRQ from becoming a widespread marketplace tool.

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However, with the development of on-demand, multi-model CRQ solutions, this is expected to change, and in 2025, more organizations will be able to reap the benefits of this innovative approach to cyber risk assessment. On-demand CRQ can automatically quantify cyber risk, requiring significantly less preliminary investment. 

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Read more about the differences between CRQ frameworks and on-demand models. 

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Even more valuable is that they are ready-informed by millions of global loss intelligence data points continuously gathered from external, objective sources, ensuring quantification outputs are accurate and reflect the latest cyber risk environment. This automation and cost-efficiency will see wide-scale enterprise-level adoption of CRQ in the upcoming years, with businesses finally being able to capitalize on accurate quantitative insights to achieve a high level of resilience.

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Navigating the Cyber Risk Landscape With Confidence in 2025 

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As business leaders update their strategies for navigating cyber risk in 2025, the rapid development of generative AI should remain at the forefront of their minds. Becoming more cost-effective and accessible, this technology will increase the volume and complexity of attacks, requiring CISOs to move beyond reactive measures and integrate proactive models that can match the speed and sophistication of potential emerging threats. 

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At the same time, the consolidation of cyber MGAs and the expansion of CRQ adoption will shape how organizations approach preparedness and overall resilience. The need for comprehensive, data-backed risk management solutions that can contextualize threats according to the organization is more pressing than ever before. Executives must invest in those tools that can help optimize resources because there will inevitably be a limit to what can be accomplished. 

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The key to navigating all of these market transformations and challenges with confidence lies in being forward-thinking. By embedding innovative technologies such as CRQ into existing strategic frameworks, CISOs can better secure their assets and ensure the business can continue to remain operational in the wake of an attack and thrive in the long term.

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To learn more about preparing for the cyber risk landscape in 2025 and leveraging tailored, data-driven insights regarding your organization’s cyber exposure, schedule a free CRQ platform demo today. 

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