Following the explosive growth of AI initiatives at all levels of various organizations last year, tech leaders have pinpointed digital trust as a crucial challenge in software development for 2025, according to the sixth annual “Reveal Survey Report: Top Software Development Challenges for 2025” survey from Infragistics.
Security, AI code reliability, and data privacy are the top software development challenges cited for 2025 by Infragistics’ respondents.
Companies are looking to expand the use of AI, adopt new technologies/applications, expand the use of data analytics/BI, and modernize applications.
The latest report from Verizon Business echoes similar concerns regarding security, noting a stark increase in cyberattacks. The report found that third-party involvement in breaches doubled to 30%, with the exploitation of vulnerabilities surging by 34%, creating a concerning threat landscape for businesses globally.
The report, which analyzed more than 22,000 security incidents, including 12,195 confirmed data breaches, found that credential abuse (22%) and exploitation of vulnerabilities (20%) remain the leading initial attack vectors and highlights the critical need for enhanced security measures.
“Businesses need to invest in robust security measures, including strong password policies, timely patching of vulnerabilities, and comprehensive security awareness training for employees,” said Chris Novak, VP, global cybersecurity solutions, Verizon Business.
Additionally, Infragistics’ survey respondents also identified business intelligence (BI) as a key area poised for growth because data-driven decision making is a competitive necessity for unlocking trends and driving strategic initiatives.
Seventy-eight percent of tech leaders expect to increase their focus on BI in 2025. The main ways companies plan to use embedded analytics and BI software this year are by improving productivity (47%); identifying trends, patterns, and outliers (42%); making better business decisions (39%); and increasing revenue (33%).
“Transitioning from a data-driven to a decision-centric vision is crucial,” according to a Gartner report. “Prioritizing urgent business decisions for modeling, aligning decision intelligence (DI) practices, and evaluating DI platforms are recommended steps.”
Gartner outlined several trending areas in the data and analytics space, including metadata management, multimodal data fabric, synthetic data, agentic analytics, AI agents, and more.
“Building a robust metadata management practice involves capturing and analyzing metadata across the entire data pipeline. Insights and automation from the data fabric support orchestration demands, improve operational excellence through DataOps, and enable data products.”
The report from Gartner also indicated, “Identifying areas where data is missing, incomplete, or costly to obtain is crucial for advancing AI initiatives. Synthetic data, either as variations of original data or replacements for sensitive data, ensures data privacy while facilitating AI development.”
Cloud continues to be ubiquitous as businesses seek to enhance flexibility, cost efficiency, and disaster recovery capabilities. A multi-cloud strategy enables companies to avoid dependence on a single cloud provider—enhancing resiliency and optimizing performance.
By distributing workloads across multiple platforms, businesses can better manage risk and ensure continuity.
As organizations across the globe migrate their operations to the cloud, they must navigate varying regional laws and standards concerning data protection. Advanced cloud governance strategies aim to provide robust mechanisms that ensure data is stored, processed, and managed in compliance with relevant laws. This includes implementing sophisticated access controls, auditing systems, and automated compliance checks that function across multi-cloud environments. Enhanced privacy features are becoming integral to cloud services, with technologies such as zero-trust architectures, end-to-end encryption, and differential privacy gaining traction.
To help bring new resources and innovation to light, each year, Database Trends and Applications magazine presents the DBTA 100, a list of forward-thinking companies seeking to expand what’s possible with data for their customers. Spanning the wide range of established legacy technologies, from MultiValue to cutting-edge breakthroughs such as the data lakehouse, data mesh, and data fabric, the DBTA 100 is a list of hardware, software, and service providers working to enable their customers’ data-driven future.
Beyond our list, DBTA presents the View From the Top section, featuring articles written by industry executives that detail how they are helping customers handle their data management problems and maximize opportunities. We encourage you to learn more about these innovative organizations by visiting their websites. And, to stay on top of the latest news, IT trends, and research, go to www.dbta.com.