2025 Outlook with Net Friends CEO

Net Friends CEO's Forecast for 2025

By every measure, the speed of technological change continues to be extraordinary. 90% of the world’s data was generated in just the past 2 years, and there are about 1.4 million tech startups globally right now looking to generate and harness that data in all sorts of novel ways. I find this all very exciting, and I’m always eager to look ahead at another year in technology. While AI and cybersecurity are certainly going to be dominant trends in the months and years ahead, I’m going to focus on some less obvious topics that I expect will have an outsized impact in 2025.

Seamless Experiences

A broad umbrella term that I expect many technology service providers will pursue is Seamless Experiences for customers. One example of a Seamless Experience is optimizing new employee onboarding to ensure all accounts, permissions, tools, and systems are fully in place right when a new hire starts their position. Another is an excellent customer service portal where you can do more than submit a support request; you'll be able to get tips on how to self-service your request or verify in real-time for any widespread outage.

We continually automate processes and further refine existing ones to ensure they operate reliably. Throughout the year ahead, our team will focus on improving new customer onboarding, workstation deployments, project management, and other activities. Each activity will initiate a streamlined, multi-step process designed to be consistent with triggers that increase service performance and efficiency.

We want our customers to expect more from their investments in technology. Our team will continue to improve the small automations and ensure that integrations between tools over the past year are delivering that seamless experience. In and of themselves these enhancements may not make a notable impact, but the accumulation of hundreds (and even thousands) of these automations are starting to significantly improve the speed and reliability of all sorts of routine transactions.

To put this in perspective, just one of the tools we use (Rewst) has helped us perform nearly 200,000 tasks per month since May 2024, saving over 600 hours in effort each quarter.

Across all our automation tools, such as CIPP, Lighthouse, Intune, and others, I expect us to save over 1,000+ hours per month of effort before the end of 2025.

Anywhere Operations

There’s always buzz about various businesses calling for a “Return to Office” to eliminate the work from home or hybrid work model. I feel that the conversation should be focused on ensuring they can be maximally effective wherever and however they work. As employees, we still expect seamless access to whatever we need from wherever we are. Likewise, businesses must strive to extend themselves to customers wherever they are, adapting to the customer’s preferred forms of interaction.

2025 will not disrupt that multi-year trend of working and consuming information on our own terms. In fact, our reliance on and expectations for these conveniences will only increase.

Net Friends has built our offerings around helping our employees and customers securely achieve Anywhere Operations. The topic of Anywhere Operations has been a recurring theme at Net Friends, and something we’ve written about extensively over the years. We have long accommodated our employees to be able to fully access data and tools from wherever they choose to work. We’ve seen how productive you can be when you don’t have to put any thought into how to access a file, collaborate with others, or authenticate into a critical system. Embedded in all actions that support Anywhere Operations is a “Zero Trust Architecture”, which helps mitigate potential security risks by design. When Zero Trust is done properly, everything is always accessible in a consistently secure way, whether you are working from your desk at the office or from a coffee shop in another state or country.  

Despite those “return to office” trends, we foresee a continued distributed workforce. Even staff who regularly work from the office still want to reliably and securely work from anywhere at their convenience. Providing all members of the workforce an opportunity to work seamlessly no matter where they find themselves is fast becoming table stakes for Managed Services Providers like Net Friends.

Business Intelligence

Most Net Friends customers are small businesses, and most are not accustomed to having fantastic data analytics at their fingertips.

We are committed to building out more ways for our customers to both access and understand how to leverage the data we can unlock for them.

We’ve already received all sorts of terrific customer requests this past year for custom reports. The groundswell of demand is building for more and more rich data to help improve decision-making within the businesses we support.

Initially, our customers will first consume Business Intelligence via reports and default dashboards we’ll make available to them. These resources will each present opportunities to encourage refinements and customizations. As our customers absorb what is possible, and we actively encourage them to engage with their data, we expect the demand for data analytics to surge.

Once you see what business insights are possible, it’s very hard to imagine making further decisions, including technology investments, without this data.

A key challenge to tracking Business Intelligence is ensuring that all customer data remains compartmentalized to protect data privacy and security. This extends to any AI model that might be employed to assist in data analysis, as it is our responsibility to protect customer data in any form and from any known risk. In our role as the SOC 2 Type II audited service provider for dozens of small businesses, we are in a unique position to provide additional assurances to our customers that their data analytics are in trusted hands with Net Friends.

The Big Picture

I see 2025 as a year where instead of building a “new” thing, we better integrate and expand on the trendlines we were already operating on. In other words, I anticipate more cohesion and iterative enhancements with our various technologies. AI and cybersecurity will continue to subtly enable the tools we use, and those very tools will become more reliable and resilient. We’ll expect more from our technology, whether it will be the richly contextualized data and insights, or that it just works with fewer clicks or taps from wherever we are. I sure hope we continue to be dazzled by what we can accomplish with technology, but regardless I expect there to be notably fewer moments where technology interrupts or impedes us.

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Don't forget to check out our 2024 in Retrospect with Net Friends President Neelesh Patel!