Two years on: which 2024 cybersecurity trend predictions actually held up

The first quarter of 2024 was peak cybersecurity-trend-post season. Every vendor blog, every analyst firm, and every CISO LinkedIn ghostwriter shipped a list of the trends that would define the year. Two years later we can do something the original posts could not: grade them against what actually happened.

Across the engagements I ran from mid-2024 through 2025, here is what aged well, what aged poorly, and what the trend posts missed entirely. This is from the seat of someone who actually had to make procurement decisions on the back of these predictions, not someone reviewing them in retrospect from outside the work.

What aged well

Supply chain risk became a board-level concern

The 2024 prediction was that supply chain attacks would push vendor risk management from the CISO's desk to the board. That happened, faster than most posts expected. By the second half of 2024, every Series B and later company I worked with had a board member asking specifically about third-party risk. By 2025, customer security questionnaires regularly included a board-level governance question about supplier risk. This was not just an enterprise dynamic. It hit Series A companies trying to close enterprise customers.

Identity became the perimeter, mostly

The zero-trust framing was overhyped. The underlying point about identity being the new perimeter was correct and remains correct. The companies that invested in real SSO, hardware-key-backed MFA, and lifecycle management for service accounts came out of 2024 and 2025 with measurably better postures. The companies that bought a zero-trust product and called it done are mostly back in market for a vCISO. There is a lesson there.

What aged poorly

AI-powered defense as a category

Every 2024 trend post had a section on AI-powered security tools. Most of those products did not deliver. The detection improvements were real but incremental, not the step-change the marketing promised. The autonomous response capabilities mostly did not work in production environments where false positives cost real money. The category that genuinely benefited from AI was developer-side: code review, SAST tuning, and security copilots. The detection-and-response category got a coat of marketing paint.

The prediction that aged worst was that AI-powered SOC products would replace tier-one analysts. As of 2026 the SOCs that tried this and the SOCs that did not are not measurably different. The work moved around but the headcount did not change much.

Zero trust as a transformation initiative

Zero trust is a sound architectural principle. It is not a project. The 2024 posts that framed it as a multi-year transformation initiative produced a generation of zero-trust programs that drifted for 18 months and ended in a dashboard that nobody updated. The companies that succeeded treated zero-trust principles as constraints on every individual decision (every new service should authenticate every request, every access path should require identity, every network segment should assume hostile traffic) rather than as a banner project. Frame matters.

The post-quantum scramble

A meaningful percentage of 2024 trend posts told CISOs to start their post-quantum readiness program. Almost nobody did, and almost nobody needed to. The NIST PQC standards landed, the major TLS libraries are rolling support out, and the threat model that justified urgency (harvest-now-decrypt-later for nation-state-grade adversaries against extremely long-lived data) applies to a small subset of organizations. For everyone else this was a 2030 problem in 2024 and remains a 2030 problem.

What the trend posts mostly missed

The biggest things to actually move the security buying decision in 2024 and 2025 were not on most trend lists.

• Customer security questionnaires became a primary deal blocker. Companies that could answer them in 48 hours closed enterprise deals; companies that took three weeks lost them. The 2024 trend posts mostly ignored this entirely.
• Compliance platform consolidation. The Vanta and Drata category became table stakes for SOC 2, but the 2024 prediction that AI would let you skip the platform never materialized. The platforms got more capable, not less necessary.
• The vCISO market grew. Not because trend posts predicted it, but because the gap between needing senior security leadership and being able to afford a $300K hire became a real procurement problem. Pretty much every Series A or B I work with looked at this option in 2025.
• Insurance carriers became security architects by proxy. Cyber insurance underwriting questions in 2025 were materially more detailed than in 2024, and companies routinely made buying decisions specifically to satisfy carriers. The 2024 posts treated cyber insurance as a financial product. It is now a control framework with claims attached.
• MFA enforcement on the small but critical exception. Almost every 2024 program had MFA on SSO with one or two legacy exceptions. Most of the breaches I reviewed in 2025 came through one of those exceptions. The trend posts told you to deploy MFA. The actual work was to enumerate every exception and close it.

What this means for 2026

I am skeptical of trend posts on principle, but if I were predicting now what will get graded well in two years, the short list looks like this. AI in code review and developer tooling: durable. AI in detection and response: still mostly hype. Customer questionnaire automation: meaningful productivity unlock for the firms that get it right. Identity hygiene as a continuous program rather than a one-time project: the right framing. Compliance platforms as evidence systems with humans on top: the operating model that actually works.

The mistake most CISOs make in trend-post season is taking each prediction and turning it into a budget line. Better is to read the predictions, ignore the framing, and ask: what changed about how my customers, my auditors, and my carriers expect me to operate? That is the question the trend posts are bad at and the buyers are good at.