Office cold, kettle on, pad open. The break was unremarkable and the customer-portfolio carried into the new year without any incidents requiring out-of-hours engagement. The Treasury BeyondTrust case I noted on the 31st of December has continued to produce subsequent public detail through the holiday period; the customer-portfolio briefings this week will address the case in fuller form than the year-end note had space for.
The portfolio. Six vCISO clients carrying through. Eighteen SOC customers. Twenty-four EmilyAI commercial customers entering the year, with three additional prospects in late-stage commercial discussion for Q1 close. The team is at forty-one. The 2025 hiring plan envisages four to six further hires through the year.
The DORA deadline is on the 17th of January — eleven days. The financial-services customer-organisation in our portfolio has been on the DORA-readiness programme through 2024 and is in attestable position for the deadline. The wider customer-portfolio is not directly in DORA scope but the customer-portfolio organisations with financial-services-adjacent operational relationships have been adapting to the regulatory environment that DORA creates for their counterparties.
The regulatory-environment progression continues. The post-NIS2-deadline operational regime is in active enforcement-development across EU jurisdictions. The EU AI Act's staged compliance deadlines through 2025-2026 are producing customer-organisation programme work. The UK Cyber Resilience Act legislative progression continues. The aggregate regulatory environment in 2025 is substantively more demanding than at any previous point in my career; the customer-portfolio programme work that has been continuous through 2022-2024 has produced operational maturity that is sufficient to the demands but the operational tempo is sustained.
The threat-landscape planning for 2025. The Salt Typhoon and broader Chinese-state-actor activity. The post-Operation-Cronos, post-BlackCat-seizure ransomware ecosystem evolution under whatever cluster-branding emerges. The continuing language-model-environment progression on both offensive-and-defensive sides. The credential-and-infostealer-driven mass-campaign pattern that the Snowflake case demonstrated in 2024. The aggregate threat picture is consistent with the 2024 trajectory.
The product roadmap. EmilyAI v3.4 in Q2 with substantive language-model-capability extensions. v3.5 in Q4. The team's research agenda continues with two preprint-stage papers on adversarial-robustness and federated-learning-for-cross-customer-detection that may convert to formal peer-reviewed submissions through the year.
The book project. The regulatory-environment book is in early drafting. The 2025 publishing target is unrealistic against the operational-tempo of the year ahead; 2026 publication is more plausible.
The kettle has boiled. Inbox now.