Commissioned by Scale Venture Partners
Published April 2025
Executive summary
Over the last 12 months, there is one word that best describes the cyber threat landscape: velocity.
The speed of cyber threats created an urgent and pressing need for CISOs to respond, as cybercriminals continued to leverage generative AI to increase the volume and velocity of attacks, leaving enterprises on the defense against increased threat activity.
In response, enterprises are prioritizing strategies to respond to threats, invest in security tools, mitigate the cybersecurity skills gap and integrate AI responsibly.
In fact, threat actors are now breaking out into networks faster than ever, according to CrowdStrike, with adversaries moving laterally across a compromised network in 48 minutes on average, with 51 seconds breaking the all-time low record as the fastest time ever recorded.
Security leaders expressed serious concerns that “if we fail [to adapt] … the losses will be immeasurable.”
High-profile breaches and zero-day exploits continue to dominate headlines, while enterprise security teams remain under-resourced from a team, technology and budget standpoint. This forces organizations to make strategic investments to combat the speed, scale and complexity of attacks. The good news? It seems to be working.
AI is both cybersecurity’s biggest threat and most promising savior. Three of the top six challenges related to AI this year, lead by AI-driven cyber attacks (#1), in addition to AI defenses (#5) and generative AI (#6). On the defense side, 77% of CISOs were confident in the future potential of AI to improve their security posture this year, with 75% of firms expressing interest in leveraging AI agents to automate SOC investigations using AI agents by triaging large volumes of security alerts.
As AI dominates both sides of the threat landscape, Scale Venture Partners conducts ongoing research to understand CISO challenges and evolving security solutions. Now in its 12th year, this year’s report consolidates perspectives from CISOs, CIOs, VPs, directors, and IT managers.
Scale Venture Partners commissioned Everclear Marketing and Osterman Research to conduct a survey of 301 security leaders in the United States who are responsible for buying decisions, the success of security deployments, or the overall security of the company.
See also:
- Scale VP’s blog post on the 2025 report.