Business & Money | Monday 30 November, -0001 12:00 am |

International Data Corporation (IDC) today hosted more than 200 of Saudi Arabia's most influential security decision makers at the Burj Rafal Hotel Kempinski in Riyadh for the 2019 edition of the IDC Security Roadshow. Running under the theme of 'Business Security: Risk & Resilience', the finely-tuned event served as an exclusive information-sharing forum and networking platform for senior security executives from the Kingdom’s most prominent enterprises.

Uzair Mujtaba, IDC's program manager for IT services in Saudi Arabia, opened proceedings by presenting the event's keynote address, which was titled 'Security Strategies in the Era of Widespread Innovation'. "Organizations across the Middle East and Africa are increasingly trying to strike a balance between keeping the lights on and improving business agility," said Mujtaba. "Digital transformation strategies and shifting industry dynamics are driving them to innovate and experiment with new types of technologies, which in turn are creating a complex ecosystem that is beset by new IT security challenges. In this new era, IT security is no longer limited to protecting technology assets; it must also ensure business resiliency. Consequently, as digital transformation initiatives progress, the pressure is mounting on organizations to build business-level strategies for security."

The agenda featured a series of expert-led sessions that explored the very latest IT security best practices and stressed the need to build effective response plans as part of a comprehensive enterprise-wide security strategy that can adapt to rising threat complexities. The wide-ranging topics discussed over the course of the day included:

• Adaptive Cyber Deception for Early & Accurate Threat Detection & Response
• The Visible Attack Surface – What It Is and Why It Matters
• Preparing a Cyber-Resilience Defense Strategy to Stay One Step Ahead
• Combatting Today’s Advanced Attackers: Key Trends, Predictions, & the Need for Speed

Addressing the growing complexity of security threats as digital transformation becomes increasingly mainstream, Hamza Naqshbandi, IDC's country manager for Saudi Arabia, believes that Saudi organizations will need to embrace a more pervasive approach to security as they look to align themselves with the core objectives of the Kingdom's National Transformation Program.

"The benefits of undergoing such transformation are well known," says Naqshbandi. "However, the trade-off comes in the form of new security vulnerabilities and myriad issues relating to risk and trust as organizations continuously implement new technologies in an effort to meet growing customer demands for a seamless omniexperience. As such, there is a pressing need for security to become more pervasive; it needs to be embedded into the vision of the organization and treated as a core metric. In this era of digital transformation, organizations can no longer settle for standard security solutions; they must move forward by embracing a proactive approach to the issues of defense, protection, mitigation, compliance, trust, and risk.”

IDC's valued partners for the IDC Security Roadshow 2019 in Riyadh included IBM, Attivo Networks, Skybox Security, MIS, CrowdStrike, and BlackBerry as Platinum Partners; Carbon Black, Tripwire, and HP Inc. (in association with Intel) as Gold Partners; Qualys, Fidelis Cybersecurity, Malwarebytes, Advanced Electronics Company, Checkmarx, and Forcespot (in association with SGBox) as Silver Partners; and Global Knowledge and Lenovo (in association with Intel) as Exhibit Partners.