LEAP has announced the return of its revamped fourth edition, set to take place from February 9 to 12 at the Riyadh Exhibition & Convention Centre in Malham. Under the theme ‘Into New Worlds,’ LEAP 2025 marks the pioneering tech event’s first ticketed edition, aiming to attract a higher percentage of influential industry attendees to boost business networking and investment opportunities across the technology landscape.

Co-organized by Tahaluf and the Ministry for Communications and Information Technology (MCIT)—a joint venture between Informa PLC, the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming and Drones (SAFCSP), and the Events Investment Fund—LEAP 2025 promises advanced features. These include a new series of ‘LEAP Nights’ activities, the return of DeepFest, a dedicated Tech Arena, a SportsTech Track, and a commitment to fostering innovation across multiple sectors such as space, gaming, education, and smart cities, spread over 20 stages.

Tahaluf anticipates the fourth edition will see a significant increase in valuable interactions between exhibitors and visitors, with LEAP 2025 guests engaging with more than 680 start-ups, over 1,000 expert speakers, and over 1,800 global tech brands. LEAP 2025 is set to offer attendees more exclusive experiences, with a focus on connecting the right people with the latest and most exciting technologies.

A brand new SportsTech Track will merge the world of sports with cutting-edge tech trends. Attendees can step into the future of sports through live demos, industry announcements, and the latest innovations from clubs, industry leaders, and sector pioneers. Notable speakers include Patrice Evra, successful entrepreneur and former Manchester United forward, and Mathieu Pierre Flamini, former French professional footballer and co-founder of GF Biochemicals.

Another new addition to LEAP 2025 is the Tech Arena, where attendees can witness live product demos, get hands-on with prototypes, and see groundbreaking technology in action. This arena will feature a lineup of interactive engagements, connecting participants directly with tomorrow’s breakthrough technologies and innovations.

The Startup Stage at LEAP 2025 will shine a spotlight on the brightest innovators and startups. Whether pitching, networking, or exploring attendees will find the Startup Stage to be the place where ideas take flight and the future of tech unfolds. Expanding beyond the convention halls, LEAP 2025 introduces LEAP Nights. Attendees can immerse themselves in Riyadh’s vibrant cultural scene with an exciting lineup of dinners, meetups, and live entertainment. LEAP Nights will provide the perfect backdrop for networking, socializing, and soaking in the city’s energy while forging new connections across the global tech community.

LEAP 2025 will also feature enhanced matchmaking, investor-to-investor workshops, and more mentorship sessions. Attendees can join LEAP’s investor and startup ecosystem, bringing over 1,500 global investors and startups to Riyadh. The Investor Program includes dedicated lounges, an exclusive area for investors to connect with General Partners, Limited Partners, Funds of Funds, and a matchmaking zone with personalized networking spaces.

LEAP 2025 boasts an impressive lineup of notable international figures. Confirmed attendees include Ken Kutaragi, former Chairman and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, coinciding with PlayStation’s 30th anniversary on December 4th; Javier Tebas, President of LA LIGA, Spain’s professional football league; Connie Chan, General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz; and Andrea Vena, Chief Climate and Sustainability Officer of the European Space Agency.

The event will also welcome back familiar guest speakers and global technology leaders, such as Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEO of IBM, who attended last year. Previous LEAP editions have featured renowned tech experts like Eric Yuan, Founder and CEO of Zoom Video Communications; Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok; and Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer of Google and renowned tech commentator.

Attendees can anticipate more high-calibre speakers and exhibitors as LEAP continues to solidify its reputation as the premier venue for connecting technology thought leaders and pioneers. With 75 per cent of conference speakers travelling to Saudi Arabia to participate, LEAP promises to be a significant event in the global tech calendar.

His Excellency Eng. Abdullah Alswaha, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology, emphasized LEAP’s role in defining the Kingdom’s future, saying, “LEAP has made an outstanding contribution to the realisation of the Saudi Vision 2030 goals and has rightly positioned the country as a global technology hub. The decision to move to a ticketed format this year makes LEAP more of an exclusive experience for attendees and relevant to today’s global technology elite. LEAP 2025 will showcase exceptional technology innovations, business opportunities and content – ensuring Saudi Arabia becomes the world’s undisputed technology aggregator.”

Faisal Alkhamisi, Chairman of the SAFCP, said the new LEAP 2025 initiatives reflected the event’s role in mirroring the rapid pace of tech industry developments and hinted at even more to come. “Over the past three years, LEAP has evolved at a rocket-fuelled pace, playing a critical role in nurturing talent, creativity, and investment. Yet, this is just the beginning. LEAP will continue to reflect the ever-changing tech landscape and inspire pioneers from across the globe,” Alkhamisi added.

Michael Champion, CEO of Tahaluf, Saudi Arabia’s largest B2B event organiser and organiser of iconic brands LEAP, Cityscape, and Black Hat MEA, explained, “By transforming LEAP, we are creating a more curated experience. Transitioning to a ticketed model will allow exhibitors and participants to benefit from direct access to a highly engaged and laser-focused audience, leading to more meaningful collaborations and business opportunities. This change reflects our commitment to delivering an event that continues to set the gold standard for tech innovation globally. In the space of just three years, LEAP delivered an incredibly public and private onsite investment totalling more than $27.5 billion, set ever higher benchmarks for tech events worldwide, and delivered the economic impact that stretched well beyond the exhibition and conference floors. With our new strategically focussed format, we expect to accelerate the investment stream and supercharge innovation.”

Tenable has announced its participation at LEAP 2024, Riyadh, from March 4th to 7th, 2024. The company will be showcasing Tenable One, the first and only exposure management platform that provides holistic visibility across IT and OT environments spanning IT assets, cloud resources, containers, web apps, identity systems, OT and IoT assets.

Virtually every industry today faces increased cyberattacks. Facilitating this is the convergence of IT and OT environments alongside cloud adoption. These trends expand the attack surface security teams need to defend. Threats that originate in IT systems can quickly spread to OT environments, leading to expensive downtime with increasingly harmful consequences. At the heart of nearly all attacks is a compromised identity that allows threat actors to infiltrate infrastructure unchallenged. Tenable’s exposure management solutions illuminate the attack paths and misconfigurations that exist before threat actors can exploit them.

The latest functionality within Tenable One for OT/IoT extends visibility beyond IT, to include OT and IoT, and helps security leaders gain a clear picture of true exposure across their entire attack surface. This first-of-its-kind approach allows organizations to prioritize security risks wherever they reside — be it in the cloud, data centre, or the OT environment — and most importantly, to understand how these risks create attack paths across their infrastructure.

“Showcasing Tenable One at LEAP 2024 is a pivotal moment for Tenable,” said Maher Jadallah, Senior Director of Middle East and North Africa, Tenable. “With organizations across Saudi Arabia stepping up their digitization efforts, there are countless attack paths that can remain undefined until it is too late. Tenable One demonstrates how a unified front across IT and OT/IoT can reduce this threat. We’re looking forward to demonstrating our capabilities at LEAP 2024.”

During LEAP, in addition to its Tenable One Exposure Management platform, Tenable will be showcasing:

• Tenable Cloud Security — a multi-cloud solution that simplifies cloud complexity and, through precise contextual analysis, enables teams to efficiently identify and address accurately prioritized security gaps.
• Tenable OT Security — an industrial security solution that identifies assets in the OT environment, communicates risk, prioritizes action and enables IT and OT security teams to work better together.
• Tenable Identity Exposure — a fast, agentless Active Directory (AD) and Azure AD security solution that allows organizations to see everything in their complex AD environment, predict what matters to reduce risk and eliminate attack paths before attackers exploit them.

Tenable will be exhibiting at Hall 1, Booth B60 at LEAP 2024.

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 10^th percentile to the top 10^th 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.