What Will CIOs Prioritize in 2025?
Nasuni Product Marketing Director Lance Shaw discusses Gartner’s recent 2025 CIO Priorities report, and what it means for global enterprises.
January 20, 2025 | Lance Shaw

The message from IT leaders at Gartner’s recent IOCS conference was crystal clear. Every CIO we spoke with at the Nasuni booth or met during the event brought up the same three themes. 2025 CIO priorities are going to focus on improving operating margins, ensuring compliance and minimizing risk, and optimizing the utilization of existing assets, including those oh-so valuable entities called humans.
These three priorities and others are reflected in Gartner’s 2025 CIO Agenda: Benchmark Top Priorities and Technology Plans Across Industries. Obviously, AI is top of mind for any enterprise leader as well, and it’s a major theme in the report. At IOCS, we had some great conversations on the subject, including why you can’t have an AI strategy without a data strategy. But let’s leave AI aside for a moment.
We partnered with Gartner to offer this CIO Agenda report to our readers, so be sure to take a look if you have a minute. First, though, let’s look at these three CIO priorities and how they relate to Nasuni.
1. Reducing costs
Regardless of industry, Gartner found that improving operating margins is the top priority for IT executives. No surprise there, really. What often does surprise our potential customers, though, is how much they can save by modernizing with Nasuni. When companies switch to hybrid cloud storage with Nasuni, they remove redundant file storage systems, eliminate unnecessary backup and recovery solutions, and generally reduce their reliance on hardware. One of our customers, Western Digital, eliminated 100+ storage devices from 7 different vendors.
Nasuni customers generally see cost reductions of up to 50%, and that’s not even getting into the soft cost savings associated with simpler management, faster recoveries, and accelerated workflows.
2. Minimizing risk
The number two priority should also come as no surprise: IT leaders must ensure compliance and minimize risk. This lines up perfectly with one of our technology’s core strengths. The Nasuni File Data Platform helps CIOs minimize the business risk of cyberattacks through a robust combination of security, detection, and near-immediate recovery. The platform sees to it that your files are protected and that you’ll be able to rapidly identify, quarantine, and recover from ransomware attacks.
I already mentioned the importance of a strong data management strategy for leveraging AI, but it’s equally critical to have a strong data security strategy in place for 2025 and beyond. By reducing and even eliminating downtime, Nasuni ensures that cyber threats, disasters, and simple old human error don’t stand in the way of business productivity.
3. Driving efficiency
To keep this short, I’m bundling two other critical CIO priorities — optimizing asset utilization & human capital effectiveness — into one directive. Simply put, IT leaders are looking for solutions that make their people and organizations more efficient.
When all your file data is managed in a single cloud file system, you get more out of your existing IT infrastructure since file storage isn’t filling up expensive hardware, and your end users can work and collaborate more effectively. Even large project teams in different locations stay in sync. And since Nasuni works with any type of file, from complex engineering drawings to massive 3D models, everyone in your organization can work faster.
At one of our architecture firm customers, designers were accustomed to waiting 15 minutes for a large file to load, and Nasuni dropped that to under a minute. According to the company’s Director of IT, this performance gain is now translating into cost savings because Nasuni is optimizing those designers’ time — a message that resonated with his executive board.
This ties back to AI — doesn’t everything? —since the enterprise deployment of AI is all about productivity and efficiency. Again, Nasuni is going to be critical for effective AI implementation planning, because these tools aren’t going to boost your organizational efficiency if they’re not able to access the best data.
Read the report today
While there’s nothing like attending IOCS, connecting with CIOs and IT leaders in person, and hearing firsthand what matters most to them, this report is really the next best thing.
Take a few minutes today to read through the 2025 CIO Agenda: Benchmark Top Priorities and Technology Plans Across Industries report and learn more about how other IT leaders are planning for the years ahead.
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