What is your position in Saudi Arabia and the broader region?

MUDAR AL ANI British Telecom Al Saudia offers BT Global Services’ portfolio as well as specialized local solutions including system integration and professional and managed services to help our customers transform and innovate in this era of digital disruption and an ever-changing technological landscape. With digitalization and disruptive technologies on the forefront, we are embracing change rather than resisting it. We update our solution offering on a yearly basis to provide state-of-the-art technological solutions for local organizations. Our current portfolio includes system integration, professional and managed services for network infrastructure, unified communication and collaboration, video telepresence, wireless solutions and analytics, data centers and cloud computing, network and cyber security, IoT smart solutions, and global and local IP networks (MPLS). We leverage our strong global partnerships with many key vendors worldwide and have built local alliances in Saudi, which gives us the edge over other ICT players in the market. Utilizing our vendor-agnostic approach, our offering to customers is the right technology choice for their specific business needs. Our team of more than 200 people now supports Saudi customers across four regional offices.

MOATAZ BIN ALI Trend Micro is uniquely positioned in Saudi Arabia, having its head office for the MENA region in Riyadh, rather than Dubai, where most cybersecurity firms have theirs. The office was set up in the beginning of 2018, and by the end of 2019 we will have established our full regional head office operations here. The upper management is 100% Saudi, and in one year we have grown our Saudi operations from six to 70 team members, with the majority of them Saudis. We invest considerably in the ecosystem by building capacity for our partners and bringing technology transfer and training and development for cybersecurity professionals. As part of that, we have invested in the Start Safe program, a Trend Micro program planned to support 1,000 Saudi start-ups with a funded cybersecurity platform to help them focus on their core business, grow with our protection, and build the right community around them. With our commitment to the country and the whole region, we have assumed a broader mandate in the region rather than just a normal cybersecurity vendor.

What are the main cybersecurity challenges in Saudi Arabia, and how do you help companies face them?

MAA As per IDC, 46% of companies will implement advanced security solutions to secure their data and IT infrastructure, and 75% of decision makers will invest in cybersecurity. These are not only predictions, but a real roadmap, considering that it was reported in 2018 that cyber crimes in Saudi Arabia could cost its economy around SAR30 billion by 2020. These evolving events clearly indicate the necessity of standing against cybercrime. Saudi Arabia is pouring millions into cybersecurity and is the largest national market in the region. According to IDC, the overall security spending in the Kingdom could reach USD415 million in 2019, expanding at CAGR of 7.9% till 2022. Being one of the top services providers in the Kingdom for the past 30 years, we understand the challenges and pain-points of customers here. With the expertise we gained through BT Security by deploying key strategic security programs specifically in Saudi Arabia, British Telecom Al Saudia understands that organizations of all sizes and in all industries are struggling to secure their most critical assets.

MBA Our portfolio addresses the most targeted domains in the industry: endpoint security, data and information security, server and data center security, cloud defense, network defense, custom systems defense, industry-specific security, IoT, OT and embedded security, managed detection and response (MDR), virtual patching, and security analytics. To be sure, every piece of technology has its own security solution, so there is no one-size-fits-all security solution. Unfortunately, this also means that no IT security team has the ability to fully automate security and have full insight over their entire IT environment. This tends to create blind areas in an organization’s security, allowing hackers to access the organization through these blind and weakly secured areas and is one of the biggest reasons why industrial security is so fragile. Hackers can slip through the most fragilely protected parts in factories, which are usually outdated machinery infrastructure, into the entire organization. With the connected threat defense approach, Trend Micro has revolutionized that, allowing the organization to connect all security solutions into one automated control system.