Cyber Security
ADGM Data Protection Regulation 2021: UAE Businesses Continuing to Strive for Data Protection Excellence

February 14th, 2022 will mark the first anniversary of the enactment of the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) Data Protection Regulation 2021, which was introduced with the aim of creating a world-class data protection framework that protects personal data, while also making foreign data transfers easier by aligning with the EU’s GDPR. One year on, UAE organisations have made significant progress in their data protection efforts, with 58% claiming that their security measures have kept up with COVID-led digital transformation projects, compared to just 43% in the year before, according to recent research by Veritas.
However, many UAE organisations still lack clarity about the data they might need to protect. According to Veritas research, an average of 38% of the data UAE organisations are storing is “dark” – that is to say, they don’t know what it is – and that a further 49% is Redundant, Obsolete, or Trivial (ROT). This one-year anniversary marks the end of the twelve-month transition period set by ADGM, meaning that organisations operating within the jurisdiction and beyond, are now bound to ensure compliance with the new requirements of the regulation. Failure to comply carries the risk of stiff financial penalties of up to $28 million for serious breaches.
Johnny Karam, Managing Director & Vice President of International Emerging Region at Veritas, said, “The last 18-24 months have been tough on businesses – the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses to accelerate their digital transformation journeys, creating yet another layer of complexity for compliance. Unfortunately, many organisations are now lagging behind when it comes to protecting their IT environments, leaving them badly exposed to digital risk. The good news is UAE businesses have recognised this gap in their security measures and 21% confident that they will be able to close the gap this year, putting them in better stead for regulatory compliance.”
Another key challenge over the past 18 months has been the mass shift to remote working, which has led to employees becoming increasingly reliant on cloud-based technologies. Unfortunately, the more people there are accessing cloud drives and shared documents, the more opportunities there are for human error and data loss incidents to occur. In fact, recent Veritas research revealed that just 18% of employees would immediately alert their IT department if they had accidentally introduced ransomware into their organisations through shared cloud environments. Another 43% said they would either do nothing or pretend it hadn’t happened. This could have serious consequences for businesses that are missing the opportunity to prevent data breaches and maintain compliance with regulations.
Karam continued, “Regulations, such as the ADGM Data Protection Regulation 2021, are setting the gold standard for protecting personal data. This is a significant opportunity for organisations to reassess the security measures across their IT environments to not only improve data protection, but to also increase companywide efficiency, improve customer experiences, and open up new revenue streams. The UAE is a global hub for innovation. However, the rise in increasingly sophisticated cybercrime means that organisations need to ensure their security measures evolve just as quickly as their digital transformation efforts to keep their data safe. Modern data protection platforms that can operate across the entire data estate – both in your data centre and the public cloud – can help businesses radically reduce the time and effort required to manage data protection and compliance protocols, thereby fulfilling their obligations to the ADGM Data Protection Regulations without shouldering the burden of managing various protection solutions.”
Note: Changes in text in the first and second paragraph
Last edited: 14th February, 2022
Cyber Security
GISEC Global 2025: Phishing, Data Breaches, Ransomware, and Supply Chain Attacks Causing Challenges

Maher Jadallah, the Vice President for Middle East and North Africa at Tenable, says effective exposure management requires a unified view of the entire attack surface (more…)
Cyber Security
GISEC Global 2025: A Place Where Innovation, Partnerships, and Leadership Come Together

Meriam ElOuazzani, the Senior Regional Director for META at SentinelOne, says, the company will showcase its latest developments in AI-powered security solutions, reinforcing its position as a leader in this area (more…)
Artificial Intelligence
Cequence Intros Security Layer to Protect Agentic AI Interactions

Cequence Security has announced significant enhancements to its Unified API Protection (UAP) platform to deliver a comprehensive security solution for agentic AI development, usage, and connectivity. This enhancement empowers organizations to secure every AI agent interaction, regardless of the development framework. By implementing robust guardrails, the solution protects both enterprise-hosted AI applications and external AI APIs, preventing sensitive data exfiltration through business logic abuse and ensuring regulatory compliance.
There is no AI without APIs, and the rapid growth of agentic AI applications has amplified concerns about securing sensitive data during their interactions. These AI-driven exchanges can inadvertently expose internal systems, create significant vulnerabilities, and jeopardize valuable data assets. Recognising this critical challenge, Cequence has expanded its UAP platform, introducing an enhanced security layer to govern interactions between AI agents and backend services specifically. This new layer of security enables customers to detect and prevent AI bots such as ChatGPT from OpenAI and Perplexity from harvesting organizational data.
Internal telemetry across Global 2000 deployments shows that the overwhelming majority of AI-related bot traffic, nearly 88%, originates from large language model infrastructure, with most requests obfuscated behind generic or unidentified user agents. Less than 4% of this traffic is transparently attributed to bots like GPTBot or Gemini. Over 97% of it comes from U.S.-based IP addresses, highlighting the concentration of risk in North American enterprises. Cequence’s ability to detect and govern this traffic in real time, despite the lack of clear identifiers, reinforces the platform’s unmatched readiness for securing agentic AI in the wild.
Key enhancements to Cequence’s UAP platform include:
- Block unauthorized AI data harvesting: Understanding that external AI often seeks to learn by broadly collecting data without obtaining permission, Cequence provides organizations with the critical capability to manage which AI, if any, can interact with their proprietary information.
- Detect and prevent sensitive data exposure: Empowers organizations to effectively detect and prevent sensitive data exposure across all forms of agentic AI. This includes safeguarding against external AI harvesting attempts and securing data within internal AI applications. The platform’s intelligent analysis automatically differentiates between legitimate data access during normal application usage and anomalous activities signaling sensitive data exfiltration, ensuring comprehensive protection against AI-related data loss.
- Discover and manage shadow AI: Automatically discovers and classifies APIs from agentic AI tools like Microsoft Copilot and Salesforce Agentforce, presenting a unified view alongside customers’ internal and third-party APIs. This comprehensive visibility empowers organizations to easily manage these interactions and effectively detect and block sensitive data leaks, whether from external AI harvesting or internal AI usage.
- Seamless integration: Integrates easily into DevOps frameworks for discovering internal AI applications and generates OpenAPI specifications that detail API schemas and security mechanisms, including strong authentication and security policies. Cequence delivers powerful protection without relying on third-party tools, while seamlessly integrating with the customer’s existing cybersecurity ecosystem. This simplifies management and security enforcement.
“Gartner predicts that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024, enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously. We’ve taken immediate action to extend our market-leading API security and bot management capabilities,” said Ameya Talwalkar, CEO of Cequence. “Agentic AI introduces a new layer of complexity, where every agent behaves like a bidirectional API. That’s our wheelhouse. Our platform helps organizations embrace innovation at scale without sacrificing governance, compliance, or control.”
These extended capabilities will be generally available in June.
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