2025: The Dawn of Semi-Autonomous Cybersecurity

Posted January 21, 2025

In what security experts are calling a pivotal moment for cybersecurity, 2025 is poised to usher in the era of semi-autonomous security operations. According to Google Cloud’s 2025 Cybersecurity Forecast, this transition represents a crucial middle ground between traditional human-operated security and fully autonomous systems. And a necessary response to the inevitable rise of AI used in attacks.

Semi-autonomous security represents an intermediate stage where AI systems handle significant portions of security operations while remaining under human oversight. As outlined in Google Cloud’s forecast, this approach requires enough capabilities in security workflows to be handled by the system itself, while maintaining human operators who can accomplish much more with AI support.

Why 2025 Marks the Transition

As Sunil Potti, VP/GM of Google Cloud Security, states,

“2025 is the first year where we’ll genuinely see the second phase of AI in action with security.”

Sunil Potti, VP/GM, Google Cloud Security

This follows a period where practitioners have been using AI to democratize security, automating complex report summarization, querying vast datasets, and obtaining real-time assistance for various tasks.

Key Components of Semi-Autonomous Security

Enhanced Threat Detection and Response

The system will be able to parse through alerts—even with false positives—to create a list of the highest priority items, enabling security teams to further triage and remediate the risks that matter most. This represents a significant advancement from traditional manual alert processing.

Cloud-Native Security Operations

According to the forecast, 2025 will see more widespread adoption of cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) solutions. These systems will serve as the central nervous system of the security operations center (SOC), ingesting everything from cloud logs to endpoint telemetry.

Advanced Automation

Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) capabilities will move beyond basic playbook execution to handle more complex incident response, including:

Automated malware analysis
Phishing takedowns
Preemptive vulnerability patching

Challenges and Considerations

The transition brings several key challenges:

Organizations must balance AI automation with necessary human oversight
Security teams need to adapt to working alongside AI systems
Infrastructure must evolve to support this hybrid approach

The AI Security Landscape

The forecast highlights that while AI brings new capabilities for defenders, it also provides malicious actors with powerful tools for social engineering, disinformation, and other attacks. Semi-autonomous security systems help organizations maintain the speed and scale needed to counter these evolving threats.

Looking Ahead

As Phil Venables, VP, TI Security & CISO at Google Cloud, observes,

“2025 is going to be the year when AI moves from pilots and prototypes into large-scale adoption.”

Phil Venables, VP, TI Security & CISO, Google Cloud

Organizations should prepare for this transition by evaluating their current security operations and planning their path toward semi-autonomous capabilities. Leading OEMs, such as WatchGuard, have already been integrating AI into security products such as ThreatSync for AI powered NDR and will be key players in smoothing the transition.

This new era of cybersecurity represents a fundamental shift in how organizations approach security operations, combining human expertise with AI capabilities to create more robust and scalable security postures.

Kyle Vinar

Kyle Vinar is Chief Operating Officer of Verus. He oversees all business operations and coaches Verus teams to continually improve on their solutions from client experience to product development and overall solution implementation. He works with all Verus resources to increase efficiencies and excellence in every aspect of their organizational roles. Kyle believes that people are the last real competitive edge that a company can have and constructing a rich culture is a vital step in running a world-class organization. Therefore he strives to create a culture within Verus that allows everyone to show up authentically and grow both personally and professionally, which in turn allows Verus team members to provide clients with top-of-the-line service. Kyle helps balance strategy, capacity, and culture in such a way that has allowed Verus to achieve exponential growth since he joined the company in 2013. One of Kyle’s greatest professional achievements has been in helping lay the foundation upon which Verus could be named the 2nd Best Place to Work by the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal. Kyle holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from St. Cloud State University. He lives in Champlin with his wife and 3 children. He has enjoyed volunteering as a soccer coach for over 6 years and was the former Director of Coaching for Rebels Soccer Club. If Kyle isn’t on the sidelines of one of his children’s soccer games or in the audience of his eldest’s musicals, he can often be found cruising scenic routes on his Harley, in a deer stand, or on the golf course.