LEAP
Cisco Study Identifies Key Success Factors to Boost Security Resilience in Saudi Arabia

At LEAP, Cisco released the KSA findings of its latest Security Outcomes Report, focusing on “Achieving Security Resilience”. Now in its third year, the report is Cisco’s annual security study and consists of responses from more than 4,700 participants across 26 countries, including Saudi Arabia. It identifies the top success factors that boost enterprise security resilience and measures responses against these factors to identify the biggest strengths and weaknesses in current enterprise security deployments.
Why Security Resilience Is Important in Saudi Arabia
The findings in Saudi Arabia revealed that 54 percent of organizations surveyed had experienced a security event that impacted business. The most common incidents were distributed denial of service attacks (60 percent), network or system outages (54 percent), and malicious insider abuse events (40 percent).
These incidents resulted in severe effects for the companies experiencing them, along with the ecosystem of organizations they do business with. With incidents this impactful (64 percent of organizations globally affirmed that cybersecurity incidents impact their resilience) it is no surprise that the main objectives of security resilience are to prevent incidents and mitigate losses when they occur.
Salman Faqeeh, Managing Director, Cisco Saudi Arabia commented: “In the last few years, the Kingdom has taken confident steps towards digitization, bringing new opportunities to the country. This progress must be accompanied hand-in-hand by a sharp focus on cybersecurity.”
He added: “Cisco is uniquely positioned to support the government and businesses of all sizes and across industries in the kingdom, addressing the cyber security challenges they are facing, and helping them increase their security resilience. Our presence at LEAP this year provides us with the perfect platform to engage with our partners and customers while demonstrating our latest range of security innovations and solutions for safer, more secure, and more efficient operations.”
Seven Success Factors of Security Resilience
The report develops a global methodology to generate a security resilience score for the organizations surveyed, identifying seven data-backed success factors most impactful to an organization’s security resilience. These include establishing executive support; cultivating a culture of security; simplifying hybrid cloud environments; maximizing zero trust adoption; extending detection and response capabilities; and taking security to the edge. If achieved, these factors would boost our measure of an organization’s overall security resilience from the bottom 10th percentile to the top 10th percentile.
Globally, security is a human endeavor, as leadership, company culture, and resourcing have a significant impact on resilience:
- Organizations that report poor security support from the C-suite scored 39 percent lower than those with strong executive support.
- Businesses that cultivate an excellent security culture scored 46 percent higher on average than those without.
- Companies that maintain extra internal staffing and resources to respond to incidents resulted in a 15 percent boost in resilient outcomes.
Businesses need to take care to reduce complexity when transitioning from on-premise to fully cloud-based environments:
- Companies whose technology infrastructures are either mostly on-premise or mostly cloud-based had the highest, and nearly identical, security resilience scores. However, businesses that are in the initial stages of transitioning from an on-premise to a hybrid cloud environment saw scores drop between 8.5 and 14 percent depending on how difficult the hybrid environments were to manage.
Adopting and maturing advanced security solutions saw significant impacts on resilient outcomes:
- Companies that reported implementing a mature zero trust model saw a 30 percent increase in resilience score compared to those that had none.
- Advanced extended detection and response capabilities correlated to an incredible 45 percent increase over organizations that report having no detection and response solutions.
- Converging networking and security into a mature, cloud-delivered secure access services edge (SASE) boosted security resilience scores by 27 percent.
Events
ThycoticCentrify is Now Delinea

Leveraging its presence at LEAP, Saudi Arabia’s largest-ever technology industry event, to emphasize its commitment to the Middle East region, Delinea has announced its debut as a leading provider of privileged access management (PAM) solutions for seamless security. The launch was held at the company’s stand (H3.F40), hosted by the local Middle East Delinea team.
Backed by TPG Capital, Delinea was formed in April 2021 through the merger of established PAM leaders Thycotic and Centrify. Delinea’s new brand identity underscores its significant progress as a combined company and renewed commitment to providing comprehensive, cloud-ready solutions that put privileged access at the center of cybersecurity. For small businesses and global enterprises alike, Delinea delivers the digital freedom that everyone deserves by seamlessly defining the boundaries of access.
As organizations continue their digital transformations, they are faced with increasingly sophisticated environments and more challenging requirements for securing an expanded threatscape. Legacy PAM solutions are not designed for today’s hybrid environments, are too complex, and cannot solve current privilege management challenges.
“At Delinea, we believe the opposite of complex isn’t simple – it’s seamless. Our mission is to provide security that’s invisible to the user, while simultaneously providing IT and security teams with the control they require,” said Art Gilliland, CEO at Delinea. “With Delinea, the boundaries of access are easily defined to help customers reduce risk, ensure compliance, and streamline security. We are providing privileged access without the excess.”
Delinea’s solutions grant access to an organization’s most critical data, devices, code, and cloud infrastructure using a centralized dashboard. Users get access when and where they need it, for as long as needed to complete the task. Delinea empowers agility, productivity, and security.
“One year ago, in partnership with the Thycotic and Centrify teams, we set out to build a dynamic identity security platform that delivers one of the most comprehensive product suites in the market,” said Tim Millikin, Partner at TPG Capital. “Today’s brand launch marks the next exciting milestone in this journey. Delinea is introducing the next generation of cloud-based privileged access, purpose-built for enterprises operating in today’s hybrid, perimeter-less, and ever-evolving world.”
Whether in the cloud or on-premises, Delinea provides powerful, customizable, and scalable solutions to secure organizations of any size or in any industry, no matter their PAM maturity.
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