3 Wishlist Items to Help Tech Leaders Manage Their 2025 Initiatives

Technology leaders. Champions of innovation. Directors of strategy. Protectors of data. What do you get those who truly have it all on their plates? Let’s unwrap what tech leaders have on their wishlists this holiday season to help them better manage their technical operations and build sustainable growth in the coming year.

1. AI applications that genuinely improve operations in the SOC and NOC

AI isn’t going anywhere. New use cases appear like presents under a Christmas tree, especially in the SOC (security operations center) and NOC (network operations center). According to Splunk’s State of Security 2024 report, 46% of respondents declare that generative AI will be “game-changing” for their security teams. Because of this optimism, cybersecurity professionals are increasingly incorporating AI into their workflows, with threat intelligence analysis and risk identification as the top two use cases.

On the ITOps and engineering side, practitioners have fully embraced AI and ML as part of their toolset. According to Splunk’s State of Observability 2024 report, respondents use AI/ML-powered systems to enhance observability operations, such as correlating events, prioritizing alerts, and recommending solutions. But that’s not all—where ITOps teams and engineers can really benefit from AI solutions is in alert remediation. Alert volume is a common challenge for any NOC, and AI can help with advanced correlation capabilities.

Next year, technology leaders will look for more ways AI can streamline security and observability operations. But any new tools or use cases they introduce will need to prove their value quickly or risk looking like they’re riding the “AI Polar Express” (a.k.a the hype train), which brings us to our next wishlist item.

2. A solid ROI on their technology investments

According to Splunk’s The Hidden Costs of Downtime report, at least 84% of CFOs claim they get a solid ROI from their security, ITOps, and engineering investments. Technology executives agree that these investments are worth it. The overwhelming majority said their cybersecurity and observability tools are “helpful” or “extremely helpful” in addressing downtime.

However, when it comes to AI solutions, boards and early adopters are becoming anxious about ROI and want to see solid returns on them in the coming year. Practical AI use cases, such as improving security and IT operations (sound familiar?) will pay the biggest dividends. In practice, this could be anything from setting alerting thresholds or automatically generating run books in the SOC, to driving anomaly detection and root cause analysis—as well as predicting issues and automating responses—in the NOC.

Technology leaders will need to show ROI and keep building their engagement with CFOs. Like Rudolph's nose, it will guide them to build on their most valuable investments in the new year.

3. Foundational visibility across their entire environment

Rounding out our tech leaders’ holiday wishlist is the ability to see who has been naughty or nice across any environment—from on-prem infrastructure to private and public clouds. Any technology leader knows that you can't fix what you can't see. A lack of visibility is scary, and often only realized when an incident hits—which is far too late. Get ahead of the problem and start building visibility in blind spots, starting with the services that matter most and the data that gives the best information for critical functions.

In addition, mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to recover (MTTR) can extend by days if wading through a company’s infrastructure feels like flying a sleigh through a snowstorm. Prolonged detection and recovery wreak havoc on a company’s bottom line, innovation velocity, and reputation—and demoralizes employees. Whole teams shift from producing high-value work to finding the scope and extent of the problem before they even get to a solution.

To prevent costly downtime and prolonged user-impacting incidents, technology leaders will look for solutions that provide a holistic view across complex network architectures, clouds, and vendors to remain resilient. This isn't a one-and-done holiday trend; like Santa’s elves, visibility should be worked on year-round and built into corporate culture.

It’s beginning to look a lot like resilience

If organizations want to “sleigh” the competition in the coming year, these wishlist items are a great place to start. This holiday season, give your technology leaders the gift of resilience and sustainable growth—and you’ll find yourself very merry indeed.

Want more executive takes on today's security and technology topics? Sign up for the Perspectives Newsletter.