Navigating the increasing government cybersecurity challenges in 2025 and beyond

Government agencies face unique challenges and distinct pressures. These include fragmented organizational structures, limited budgets, ever-evolving regulations, mandates that often outpace funding and a growing need to secure hybrid environments.

Amid these growing challenges, these government agencies protect high-value assets, including sensitive citizen data and critical infrastructure. To keep pace with emerging cyber threats, government agencies need to implement tailored strategies and scalable solutions that are responsive and resilient against these cyber threats.

But what will come in 2025? Here are several mandates and trends to watch out for in government security.

Identity Takes Center Stage in Cybersecurity

In 2025, identity will solidify its place as the linchpin of cybersecurity strategies — from zero trust, to secure by design, to cloud modernization. Protecting and securing identity and identity infrastructure is essential for government agencies to elevate their cyber defense.

We are already seeing a significant shift in the anatomy of an attack, and with increasing reliance on AI and cloud technology, the emphasis on identity will continue. Every breach ties back to some form of identity compromise — whether it's a machine identity, human user, or service account. 

As government agencies face mounting threats, comprehensive identity management strategies that enforce least privilege, implement just-in-time access and provide holistic visibility across your identity attack surface will dominate cybersecurity priorities.

A comprehensive identity security approach will be essential for securing privileged users, assets, and sensitive data across government agencies. This will reduce their identity attack surface, limiting the blast radius often associated with identity related cyberattacks.

Cloud Adoption Will Gain Momentum — But Risks Loom

The public sector’s migration to the cloud will accelerate, driven by the need to modernize legacy systems, harness the power of artificial intelligence and reduce technical debt. As government agencies seek to balance legacy systems with modern demands, hybrid environments — combining on-premise and cloud systems — will define government IT. 

But managing hybrid environments will introduce new risks and challenges in 2025, including expanded attack surfaces, incomplete visibility and compliance complexities.

Hybrid cloud architectures will enable greater flexibility for government agencies while ensuring mission-critical workloads remain secure — provided agencies choose solutions that offer seamless integration between on-premises and cloud systems. 

While modernization efforts like cloud adoption are crucial, they can also introduce new vulnerabilities, thus must be accompanied by robust security protections like zero trust to reduce the attack surface and mitigate evolving cyber threats. Agencies should prioritize hybrid cloud solutions that align with immediate mission and operational needs and long-term modernization goals, but should also balance innovation with security and compliance.

Growing Urgency Around Cyber Resilience Pushes Proactive Defense to Center Stage

Government agencies will face increasing urgency to develop comprehensive cyber resilience strategies that can adapt to emerging risks while strengthening foundational security protections. Defending forward with actionable threat intelligence will be critical to staying ahead of increasingly sophisticated threat actors. 

This could cause a significant shift in how governments approach cyber resilience, with more agencies adopting proactive cybersecurity practices to minimize the attack surface and be more responsive to cyber threats. Government agencies have long relied on reactive measures, but resilience hinges on the ability to anticipate and disrupt threats before they cause harm. By leveraging actionable threat intelligence, agencies can identify early warning signs and disrupt adversaries in early phases of an attack.

By strengthening public-private partnerships and improving threat intelligence sharing, governments can amplify their ability to defend forward. Anticipating new threats, finding and fixing things early, and doing so on a continuous basis are critical to building resilience into their daily operations.

Supply Chain Attacks Remain a Top Concern

2024 saw a number of high-profile third-party breaches, and nation-state actors will continue targeting government supply chains in 2025, exploiting vulnerabilities in software and hardware dependencies due to the broad-reaching implications.

Securing these chains requires addressing software complexity through practices like "software minimalism" — developing only what’s necessary to reduce vulnerabilities. Additionally, transparency between vendors, manufacturers and agencies will be critical to ensuring resilience against supply chain risks.

Security monitoring cannot just be limited to the assets that your organization owns. Establishing clear accountability and collaboration among vendors and agencies will be essential for protecting critical infrastructure from supply chain threats. More tools, like vulnerability configuration and verification of security assessment, will be needed to understand the risks of supply chain vendors.

Coordinating Whole-of-State Security Initiatives

Zero trust principles will be the cornerstone of resilient government cybersecurity strategies, but with limited budgets and varying levels of maturity among agencies, states will need a coordinated, "whole-of-state" approach.

A whole-of-state approach empowers agencies to collaborate, pool resources and implement advanced security measures. By assuming compromise and prioritizing holistic visibility, enforcing least privilege, and implementing continuous monitoring, agencies can become more proactive and responsive to cyberattacks. 

Removing the fragmented nature of state and local governments and decentralization of policies and systems through a whole-of-state approach will tremendously elevate cyber defense and increase resiliency against cyberattacks.

States will also need to invest in governance structures that can enable centralized oversight while ensuring that individual agencies and local governments can adapt solutions to their unique needs. Public-private partnerships and shared threat intelligence will be instrumental in achieving these goals. This approach will be essential to improving situational awareness and responding effectively to threats.

The Rise of AI Demands an Appropriate Response From Government Agencies

AI will drive both opportunity and disruption in government cybersecurity in 2025.

AI is rapidly transforming the cybersecurity landscape. On the one hand, it enables enhanced telemetry, anomaly detection and automation in identity management and other cybersecurity domains. On the other, deepfakes and real-time impersonation create new attack vectors for adversaries to disrupt mission operations. Government agencies must harness AI’s potential in a safe and ethical way to defend against these evolving threats, and deploy AI-driven solutions to bolster threat detection while preparing for stricter regulations.

Government agencies will continue to implement strict new policies in 2025 to counter AI-based threats, including mandatory standards for identifying deepfakes and malicious AI-generated content. 

With deepfake technology becoming more advanced, agencies must adopt proactive regulatory measures, like watermarking or verification systems, to separate real content from fake. AI regulation will also extend to ensuring transparency and accountability for the tools used by government agencies and adversaries alike.

Conclusion

2025 will present some unique challenges for government agencies, and identity security will play a critical role in protecting mission capabilities, as well as ensuring resiliency against cyberattacks. As government agencies continue along their zero trust journey, they must build the right strategies to secure and protect their paths to privilege.

Cloud modernization provides a pathway for government agencies to adopt modern technologies and capabilities to support and advance their mission needs. Government agencies will continue to move to the cloud to reduce cost and vulnerabilities associated with their legacy systems. 

As government agencies formalize modern technologies, they must be aware of the potential risk exposures and threats targeting their cloud environments. This will require agencies to implement holistic visibility and leverage AI and machine learning to accelerate detection capabilities to disrupt threat actor capabilities. The sooner the better.

Kevin Greene is chief security strategist at BeyondTrust, and is a seasoned cybersecurity expert and strategist, renowned for championing initiatives that enhance cybersecurity practices to protect the nation against cyberattacks. His expertise has earned him pivotal roles in leading government and private sector organizations, including the Department of Homeland Security, The MITRE Corporation, and Micro Focus/OpenText. Kevin has also played instrumental roles in building cybersecurity programs across government agencies as a program manager.