Data Compliance Governance

Predictions 2025: Maintaining Compliance in an Evolving Threat Landscape

Organizations and regulators must walk a fine line between maintaining security through regulatory compliance while not stifling product development

by Kiri Addison

feb. 28, 2025

Key Points

Regulatory compliance can be beneficial to organizations because it helps keep their customers secure while demonstrating strength in cybersecurity.
But compliance can be costly, requiring organizations to spend in order to maintain their compliance, especially through product development cycles.
In the coming year, the rapidly evolving threat landscape will be a real challenge for both cybersecurity companies and regulators alike as they attempt to keep up with new threats from cybercriminals.

Regulatory Compliance Benefits

Cybersecurity regulations establish a standard for organizations to protect sensitive data, maintain customer trust, mitigate cyber risks, and minimize the damage caused by potential data breaches. These regulations ensure a higher level of security across industries by enforcing best practices for data protection and privacy:

Data protection regulations mandate safeguards to protect sensitive information like personal details, financial data, and intellectual property from unauthorized access, theft, or misuse.
Compliance with regulations demonstrates to customers that an organization takes cybersecurity seriously, building trust and loyalty.
By enforcing security measures, regulations help organizations identify and address potential vulnerabilities, reducing the likelihood of cyberattacks and breaches.
Adherence to regulatory compliance provide industry standardization, creating a baseline for security practices across different industries, promoting consistency and improving overall cybersecurity posture.
Regulations provide legal accountability for consumers, but non-compliance with cybersecurity regulations can lead to significant legal penalties and reputational damage for organizations.
Regulations often require organizations to have robust incident response plans, ensuring efficient handling of cybersecurity incidents when they occur.

Some of the most well-known cybersecurity regulations include:

The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which protects the personal data of European Union residents. GDPR applies to all organizations that do business with people that living within the EU, even if the organization is not in an EU country.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, regulates the protection of patient health information in the healthcare industry in the U.S. Similar to GDPR, HIPAA applies to any organization regardless of location that works with U.S. patients.
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, or PCI DSS, is a global standard enforced by credit card brands worldwide that requires certain security standards for organizations handling credit card data.
While voluntary, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework provides a framework for organizations to manage cybersecurity risks and is adhered to by organizations wanting to demonstrate their cybersecurity strength.

Regulatory Compliance Challenges

While cybersecurity regulations are great for securing data, they can come with some challenges for cybersecurity companies that must quickly develop and release products to keep up with the rapidly evolving threats their customers face. An inability to easily locate product developers skilled in the complex security protocols that maintain compliance, a need to maintain strict data security, and a lack of flexibility in security measures that maintain compliance can all increase the cost of developing and maintaining products that are compliant with these regulations. These challenges can be even more difficult and more costly for smaller cybersecurity companies.

This can leave cybersecurity companies in a bit of a quandary, which is how to quickly develop and update products that are effective against a continually evolving threat landscape filled with threats that take less and less time for cybercriminals to develop while at the same time, ensuring their products and product updates maintain compliance.

Walking a Fine Line

In the coming year, and most likely even far beyond that, cybersecurity companies are going to have to walk a fine line between getting customers the effective products needed to secure their organizations and not running afoul of cybersecurity regulations. Apple, for instance, held back on rolling out its AI to the EU because of regulatory concerns. Meta (Facebook/Instagram) had similar concerns.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in the UK and Cyber Security and Infrastructure Agency (CSIA) in the U.S. will continue to simultaneously address the safety of users with the needs of the cybersecurity industry to create the most innovative products possible. It is most likely, however, that in the coming year, regulatory agencies will continue to struggle to keep pace with the speed of change in the cybersecurity industry, especially when it comes to cybercriminals continually looking for new ways to deploy successful attacks.

Learn More

Stay tuned to this blog for more information on regulatory concerns and how they will impact cybersecurity throughout 2025 and beyond. In the meantime, read more about Mimecast and how it can help customers maintain regulatory compliance.