Review of the Year 2025: The AI Revolution, Global Tech Outages and a Year of Growth for Lifeline IT

As 2025 draws to a close, we take a look back at the past 12 months and highlight the key events of the year for Lifeline IT and the wider business community.

Growing the Lifeline IT Team
We were thrilled to strengthen our cyber expertise with the addition of a leading cyber security specialist. Cheryl Martin joined us in the summer, following an extensive career in a number of global businesses, including BT, EY and Capgemini, where she was Vice President Head of Cyber Security. Cheryl has been a great addition to the team, enabling us to enhance the service we offer clients.

We also celebrated the first anniversary of our Management Accountant Linda Echono, who heads up our finance department and sits on our senior management team.

Building Business Connections
2025 has been a year of developing our business connections in the UK and Europe. We’ve held a series of events via our Amsterdam office, including a cyber security session for professional services organisations, and Daniel was recently part of the UK delegation from the British Embassy in The Hague at Europe’s key cyber event, The ONE conference. Lifeline IT’s Peterborough office was also a sponsor of the Peterborough Business Awards and last month Daniel spoke about IT regulation at the government’s Department of Business and Trade’s ‘Regulation Roadshow’.

An Educational Partnership
We’re delighted to announce a series of new IT and cyber projects with the London Metropolitan University, with whom we have been a partner for more than 15 years. Lifeline IT will be working with the institution’s Computing Faculty and Cyber Security Centre on a number of projects, including technical development and their new knowledge exchange in motion alongside other key UK businesses.

The AI Revolution
We can’t get to the end of the year without mentioning the accelerated growth of AI in business and everyday life. It is now the fastest-adopted consumer technology in modern history—2.8 times faster than PCs and 1.8 times faster than the internet[i] – and ChatGPT has almost 900 million regular weekly users. There’s no doubt that there are huge benefits to integrating AI into your workplace, but it’s important to do so in a safe and credible way. Read our article from September on AI adoption by AI expert James Garner: https://lifelineit.net/user-friendly-guide-to-ai/ and look out for Lifeline IT’s new AI training and deployment initiative in the new year.

Major Platform Outages
Despite the technological advancements of AI, there were major platform outages with providers including Amazon, Cloudflare and Microsoft, all of which caused significant disruption to organisations. Whilst these outages were out of your business’ control, it’s a reminder that having resilience and back-up can help mitigate the impact they have on your company. Perhaps this is something to think about for 2026, to safeguard against future outages.

And Finally
We would like to wish our UK clients Merry Christmas, Vrolijk Kerstfeest to our Dutch contacts and best wishes to everyone for the new year.