Six tech consulting trends for 2025 (Part 2)

In the first part of this series, we discussed IT consulting trends around new cloud strategies, AI and consulting as a service. Now, we will examine how enterprises are approaching a few more key challenges: managing risk, dealing with the explosion of AI-generated data, and reducing carbon emissions with more sustainable data centers. Let’s dive in.

Tech trend #4: Risk management consulting as a service will become essential.

Quantifying and mitigating risk is a key step in any technology project, but in these insecure times it is gaining importance with every passing day. Keeping a company’s operations, competitive information and customer data safe from internal and external threats is critical to both short-term and long-term viability.

In today’s interconnected world, we are more dependent than ever on a free exchange of data. High-speed fiber connections, undersea cables and remote data centers enable businesses to operate in real time on a global scale, but every connection increases the risk of hacking, intrusion, data loss or disruption. These links are vulnerable, and it’s neither possible nor practical to secure them end-to-end.

The old answer was redundancy: maintaining multiple links, multiple backup copies, even multiple environments running in parallel that could be switched in the event that one went down. This approach obviously sacrifices sustainability in favor of security. More storage equals more power consumption, not to mention the added cost of power, servers and staff to maintain them.

Finding the right balance between these competing factors requires a thorough assessment to assess and prioritize which data are absolutely essential for your daily operations, and what can be secured at a lower level of need. By only applying iron-clad security and redundancy to only your most critical apps and data you can reduce storage and power consumption needs, moving non-essential data to more economical (and less readily available) storage solutions.

Another major source of risk today is AI, which is now being employed on both sides of the cybersecurity equation — both to protect and to break in. AI models are increasingly being employed to write malicious code while at the same time, consultants are implementing AI-driven security systems to process alerts and anomalies and identify the most credible threats.

Finally, it’s critical to take compliance and legal risk into account, since new regulations like DORA and NIS2 can potentially expose enterprises to penalties for non-compliance Risk management consulting can help advise companies how to build robust IT continuity plans, helping protect against breaches and disruptions themselves, as well as the commercial and legal impacts.

Tech trend #5: Data management challenges will increase in priority.

Enterprise applications already produce huge amounts of data, but the advent of AI has created an explosion of data we have never seen before. Enterprises must not only manage the input and output of new AI models, but they also must handle the AI’s metadata.

This metadata is a completely new animal that is essential for effectively training and refining the AI to handle future queries. Unfortunately, many organizations are simply not equipped to handle this. As a result, many companies have a disorganized approach to storing it — resulting in a high degree of duplication and the associated storage crunch.

In the past, data storage was a matter of CapEx. Periodically, you might need to install and connect new racks of servers to meet the added storage needs. Now, as applications move to the cloud, this has shifted to the OpEx column, turning a one-time investment into a recurring expense that reduces margins month after month.

As we highlighted above, increased storage means increased power demand, so the real cost of data storage includes more than just the number of terabytes in a data center. From 2019 to 2024, the cost of electricity in the US rose by more than 28%. In Europe, costs rose even more, exceeding 50% in some industrialized economies.

Accordingly, there is a real drive to improve enterprise data management. Enterprises must ensure that their data is lean and clean.

This will not only require better data management practices, but a re-evaluation of how data centers are designed and operated (more on that below). Suffice it to say, the skills to manage data on this scale are very specialized and not every company has this kind of high-priced niche talent available in-house. That’s why we predict that data management consulting will become one of the hottest areas of need for global enterprises over the next 12 months and beyond.