Executive Summary  

As organizations enter 2025, the landscape of IT risk management, compliance, and operational resilience is evolving at an unprecedented pace. Increased reliance on third-party software, the rapid adoption of AI, and heightened regulatory scrutiny from frameworks like DORA, GDPR, and SEC cybersecurity rules are making manual operational risk management unsustainable. This blog includes six predictions for 2025; the rise of automated compliance monitoring, the expansion of third-party risk management beyond security vulnerabilities, the shift to proactive software health management, and the growing need for residual risk documentation.  

The post concludes by rationalizing these predictions with BugZero’s 2025 priorities designed to ensure organizations can safely, efficiently and successfully navigate 2025. 

IT risk management, compliance, and operational resilience will demand an even greater share of our attention, investments, and innovation (this is not one of our six predictions, it’s a given).  Here are six IT operational predictions for 2025 capped off with BugZero’s response to ensure our clients make 2025 their most successful and risk-free year ever (so far).  

1. Automated IT Operations Risk Monitoring, Mitigation, and Reporting Will Be Table Stakes for Effective Operational Resilience 

The spike in third-party software and managed service dependency multiplied by the rapid expansion of AI and its relatively untested underlying architectures will make manual IT operational risk management impractical if not impossible.  

Further, regulations such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), GDPR, and SEC cybersecurity rules are explicitly requiring IT automation adding regulatory and liability risk and further increasing its urgency.  

2. Third-Party Software Risk Management Products and Practices Will Expand Beyond SLA and Security Vulnerability Monitoring 

Third-party risk management (TPRM) programs traditionally focus on a combination of contractual obligations, service level agreements (SLAs), and vulnerability tracking.  

Legal, technical, and operational requirements unique to third-party technology and its suppliers will force TPRM programs to include active monitoring of operational defects and dependencies in addition to tracking external vulnerability databases. 

As with our first prediction, regulatory scrutiny will further incentivize companies to track and remediate every potential software failure that may impact operational resilience, regardless of whether it is classified as a security flaw or a broader technical defect. 

3. Proactive Software Health Management Will Eclipse Reactive Controls 

The traditional approach to IT risk – reacting to incidents as they occur – is quickly proving to be insufficient. Any opportunity to preempt rather than to react is easily justified both financially and reputationally.  

In 2025, organizations will increasingly prioritize real-time operational risk intelligence and continuous software health monitoring. This shift will enable IT teams to detect potential defects before they can impact production environments. 

AI-powered anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, and automated remediation will become increasingly mainstream.  

4. AI-Generated Code – and Exploits – Will Introduce New Risk Categories 

The rapid rise of AI-generated software development promises significant efficiency gains but also introduces new risks that organizations must address: 

• Undetectable vulnerabilities that evade traditional security testing methodologies. 

• Compliance risks related to AI-generated code licensing and intellectual property. 

• Debugging challenges, as AI-generated code lacks clear authorship and may lack effective documentation. 

• Adversarial AI attack modes will surface and operationalize attacks that will be more difficult for ethical hacking and pen testing to identify.  

5. Documentation of Residual Risks Will Become Standard Practice 

The meteoric rate of change, expanding attack surfaces, and the relative absence of legal and economic precedents will force regulatory bodies to rely more heavily on an enterprise’s documentation of their assessment of (acceptable) residual risk. Clear documentation pre-dating any future incident will play a pivotal role in how liability and culpability is determined.  

6. Maturing Risk Frameworks Will Integrate Security Vulnerabilities and Non-Security Gaps 

To simplify and strengthen IT operational risk management, organizations will need to treat security and non-security software defects as a unified risk category. This shift acknowledges that both types of defects can lead to outages, data loss, compliance violations, and financial losses. 

Taking these priorities alongside our mission to keep clients safe, increase visibility and control, and minimize outages and disruptions translates into the following strategic initiatives: 

• Expand Vendor Bug Reporting Sources – BugZero will continue to expand its inventory of operational defects in third-party software. See the current list <here>.  

• Enhance AI Filtering and Prioritization – We will continue to enhance our already advanced AI-driven bug filtering and risk classification to further eliminate data noise, streamline risk prioritization, and reduce manual operational oversight burdens. 

• Proactive Software Health Intelligence – Continue to deepen our ServiceNow integration to more effectively deliver just-in-time, targeted alerts on third-party software issues before they have the opportunity to impact operations. 

• Automate the Generation of Residual Risk Documentation – BugZero supports third-party bug risk snapshotting that can form the basis of comprehensive residual risk documentation.  

• Unified Risk Frameworks – We are collaborating with clients and domain experts to develop pre-built operational defect controls and risk mappings designed to seamlessly integrate into your existing IT operational risk management frameworks. 

2025 is poised to bring significant advancements in IT risk, compliance, and operational resilience. At BugZero, we are committed to ensuring that our clients stay on top of these challenges with cutting-edge automation, intelligence, and risk management solutions. 

Contact BugZero today to learn how we can help your organization navigate the evolving landscape of operational resilience and compliance.