How to Navigate the Top 2025 Biotech IT and Cybersecurity Challenges
The IT and cybersecurity landscape is evolving rapidly, and 2025 will bring a new wave of challenges for biotech and life sciences organizations. To help you stay ahead of these changes, our team has analyzed the top IT and cybersecurity trends for 2025 and selected the key issues that will impact biotech organizations. From successfully integrating advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to securing cloud and SaaS platforms, we’ll share the top 2025 biotech challenges and recommend actionable strategies to help you get ahead of these issues.
The Top 2025 Biotech IT & Cybersecurity Challenges
1. The Rise of Agentic AI and its implications
Gartner defines Agentic AI as “Autonomous AI [that] can plan and take action to achieve goals set by the user,” and predicts it will be a transformative trend for 2025. Agentic AI will revolutionize critical areas such as drug discovery, clinical trial design, and laboratory operations, and savvy organizations will also use it to optimize workflows, identify new compounds, and streamline patient recruitment for clinical trials.
However, these advancements come with risks. Misaligned data or poorly designed algorithms could lead to inaccurate results, regulatory violations, or ethical concerns. For example, an Agentic AI application used in clinical trials might inadvertently exclude certain populations, leading to biased outcomes. Selecting and implementing the right AI can dramatically accelerate time-to-market and productivity, but a poorly implemented and governed AI implementation could delay drug development, jeopardize public trust, and result in significant regulatory and financial impacts.
Our Recommendations: Establish governance committees including data scientists, ethicists, and compliance experts to ensure AI systems and data policies align with ethical and regulatory standards. Careful selection of AI platforms is crucial for success.
2. Strengthening AI Governance for 2025 Biotech Success
As AI adoption grows, robust governance becomes increasingly essential. Gartner predicts the widespread use of AI governance platforms in 2025, enabling organizations to monitor AI performance, ensure compliance, and address potential biases.
For biotech organizations, AI governance is particularly important in applications such as genomic research, patient data analysis, and AI-driven drug discovery. Without proper oversight, AI tools could violate privacy laws, introduce bias, or fail to meet rigorous industry standards, resulting in setbacks or regulatory scrutiny. It’s crucial to implement comprehensive AI governance policies and platforms to reduce your risk.
Our Recommendations: Evaluate current AI tools, establish or maintain regular meetings with a governance committee, invest in governance platforms designed for biotech, and train staff to maintain compliance and ethical AI usage. Check out our blogs for more advice on advanced AI and GPU platforms and how to choose between ChatGPT and Copilot GenAI.
3. Cloud and SaaS: Essential for 2025 Biotech Operations.
Cloud and SaaS platforms will continue to be the backbone of 2025 biotech operations, offering scalability and efficiency for managing massive datasets, facilitating remote collaboration, and driving innovation. Gartner emphasizes the rising importance of "industry cloud platforms," which provide customized solutions for specific industry sectors. For biotech firms, these platforms can enhance clinical trial management, streamline regulatory compliance, support advanced analytics, and more.
However, reliance on cloud systems increases exposure to risks such as data breaches, unauthorized access, and configuration errors. SentinelOne shared that 27% of organizations’ public cloud solutions were breached and cloud configuration errors were responsible for close to 23% of cloud security incidents. When a single breach could disrupt research, damage reputations, and lead to regulatory fines, robust cloud security should be a top 2025 priority for biotech organizations.
Our Recommendations: Carefully review your cloud provider’s security plan, conduct regular cloud and web application security audits, and implement least privilege identity and access management solutions and policies.
4. Preparing for Post-Quantum Cryptography
Quantum computing poses a significant threat to traditional encryption methods. The time to start planning is now, as NIST already released the first three post-quantum encryption standards in the summer of 2024. Since biotech organizations hold significant amounts of sensitive data ranging from research results to HIPAA-protected patient records, preparing for the transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is crucial for maintaining data security.
Our Recommendations: Collaborate with cybersecurity experts to assess your current encryption methods and create a roadmap for PQC adoption.
5. Managing Third-Party and Open-Source Software Risks
Third-party and open-source software are essential to biotech organizations, but they also expose organizations to supply chain vulnerabilities. A single vulnerability in a software library (remember Log4j?) or third-party provider can cause a breach. There are also many examples of third and fourth-party breaches. If you recall the Okta breach, attackers gained access to sensitive files containing session tokens. These tokens allowed attackers to bypass authentication and impersonate legitimate software services, affecting many companies, including Cloudflare, which was compromised as a result. These breaches can have very far-reaching impacts.
Our Recommendations: Add contractual breach reporting and software bill of materials (SBOM) requirements to your vendor contacts, automate vulnerability monitoring, have a strong patching program, and create (and practice) a breach response plan.
6. Reducing Technical Debt with AIOps
Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) can help reduce the impact of these 2025 biotech challenges. You can address technical debt by automating tasks, detecting system anomalies, and optimizing IT performance. AIOps tools can be offered both as standalone products and as integrated components of broader IT management or monitoring platforms, depending on the vendor and the target use case. Many of your current vendors in your tech stack have likely already launched or will shortly launch this functionality. Most of the time it’s a matter of configuring or upgrading to leverage these new tools. Or they can be dedicated AIOps platforms that specialize solely in applying AI and machine learning to IT operations. In either case, AIOps tools can reduce your IT burden by automating anomaly detection, root cause analysis, predictive analytics, and automated incident response.
Our Recommendations: AIOps tools are only as good as the data they ingest and how seamlessly they are integrated. If you are not yet using an AIOps platform or tools, it’s something to consider depending on your organization’s size and stage.
We hope you have found these top 2025 biotech challenges and recommendations helpful! If you proactively address these IT and AI challenges, you can protect your biotech organization’s security and operations while driving efficiency and innovation in the rapidly evolving 2025 biotech cybersecurity and IT landscape.
If you need help defining your biotech IT and AI strategies and policies or implementing solutions, please contact us. We provide expert biotech IT consulting and solutions from molecule to market.