ManageEngine’s Top 6 strategic priorities for enterprises in 2025

By: Rajesh Ganesan, President, ManageEngine

Significant technological enhancements have been made in 2024 to address business needs. Organizations have broadened their perspectives, shed age-old practices, and embraced novelties to strengthen their foothold in the market.

With the technological landscape evolving each year, enterprises are compelled to look into various aspects of their businesses and understand their contribution to overall growth.

One of the most prominent examples of this is the significant progress achieved by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the technology and AI industry.

And according to the “State of AI in Saudi Arabia” report, issued by the Saudi Data & AI Authority (SDAIA) the total attracted funds in Saudi AI companies reached $1.7 billion in 2023 as indicated by Crunchbase data, and in terms of AI infrastructure, the Kingdom ranked second in the Middle East in terms of the number of colocation data centers, with 22 active ones and 40 under development.

ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corporation and a leading provider of enterprise IT management solutions, has identified six key priorities for 2025 that modern organizations should consider to navigate through the challenging digital landscape.

These priorities include scaling up AI usage, democratizing cybersecurity, implementing a distributed governance model for compliance, reengineering experiences, embracing sustainability, and focusing on outcome-driven IT.

Democratizing cybersecurity:
Managing cyber risks at all levels of the workforce—and not restricting it to just the top organizational level—should be a priority for security leaders in 2025. This involves the democratization of cybersecurity, which essentially makes everyone in an organization responsible for its defense.

While there are some obvious benefits associated with this, such as proactive security management and increased cyber resilience, businesses also stand to benefit by way of cost savings, increased efficiency, and innovation in security practices.

Organizations should ensure employees undergo continuous security engagement programs, which are different from the usual annual training sessions. Employees should also have access to the appropriate self-service tools and services. This becomes crucial since the biggest challenge to democratizing security is poorly equipped employees and ill-defined processes.

Distributed govemance model for compliance
Multiple regulations and their related, year-round audits will soon force privacy and compliance leaders to implement a distributed compliance framework to ensure pervasive compliance. The general practice so far has been to entrust compliance to a central team; however, the job is intrinsic to every department within an organization.

The central compliance team is primarily responsible for program management. It should have a pulse of what’s happening in the industry and map the requirements evolving out of relevant regulations and standards. This central compliance team should keep leadership updated about the evolving landscape and macro challenges posed.

On the other hand, execution of the compliance program should be broad, empowering business functions at all levels. Each team and business function should understand risk management and use it consistently to address non-conformities flagged during audits as well as for root cause analysis of incidents.

Specific attention should be paid to training people across various business functions. This allows a better governance model to evolve because stakeholders don’t view compliance as an impediment but as an aid in growing business. A distributed framework also ensures that controls are not overengineered. Likewise, processes are more in tune with business practicalities and don’t degenerate into a set of tasks without any practical relevance. Finally, friction is reduced between the central compliance function and other business functions.

Reengineering experiences:
In any organization, customers and employees are regarded as the most valuable assets. Every single interaction they have, be it with either a human or a machine, is critical in shaping their overall experience. These experiences are crucial in determining the fate of an organization, making them a strategic priority for leadership.

With expectations evolving and technology advancing, reengineering experiences for users is instrumental in accelerating business transformation and sustenance. Ease of use, availability, consistency, being proactive with changes, contactless digital experiences, and keeping the feedback loop open are some key user expectations that can’t be ignored.

This approach involves reimagining and redesigning an organization’s existing technology architecture, which may have scalability and compatibility issues, to deliver better than before. It also includes leveraging emerging technologies such as AI, generating actionable insights from data analytics platforms, customizing workflows, and enabling multi-modal interactions.

Major challenges to reengineering include context setting—the size of the enterprise and the productivity hit taken during the shift. Another challenge would be ensuring IT security while at the same time ensuring those measures don’t hinder or impact the user experience. However, reengineering ultimately fulfills the primary purpose of the business by enhancing employee engagement and customer satisfaction.