How do the UAE’s latest cybersecurity mandates enable organisations to move from compliance to proactive threat detection?
What we’re seeing in the UAE is a decisive shift: compliance is no longer just a checkbox exercise it’s becoming the baseline for resilience. These mandates raise the floor by requiring visibility, faster reporting, and stronger governance. But more importantly, they open the door for organisations to think beyond compliance — to use those same requirements as the foundation for continuous monitoring, proactive detection, and smarter decision-making.
Personally, this is about redefining the role of compliance. It’s not the ceiling of your security maturity; it’s the starting point. The organisations that embrace this mindset will be the ones who move fastest from obligation to opportunity.
What practical steps can companies take to strengthen collaboration with public and private stakeholders in the region?
Collaboration succeeds when it’s anchored in outcomes, not tools. Companies should start by aligning their cybersecurity objectives with national priorities, resilience, trust, and economic stability. That means standardising how intelligence is shared, building joint playbooks across government and industry, and ensuring that KPIs for security map directly to board-level goals. The private sector brings innovation, the public sector brings mandate and scale when they work in tandem, intelligence becomes actionable, trusted, and fast-moving.
With AI-powered threats like deepfakes and phishing evolving, how should enterprises and partners adapt their defences?
We’re entering an era of “AI versus AI.” Attackers are weaponising AI to lower the barrier to entry, scale phishing campaigns, and even automate reconnaissance. The only viable response is to meet AI with AI, adopting governed, agentic AI for defence that accelerates detection, enriches context, and reduces the time from alert to action. Beyond tools, enterprises need to invest in behavioral baselining and continuous training, so defences evolve in lockstep with threats. The organisations that succeed will be those that treat AI not as an experiment, but as a core pillar of resilience.
How are Anomali’s Trusted Circles and AI-driven innovations transforming intelligence sharing and security operations?
The real challenge today is not a lack of data, but a lack of context. Traditional approaches often drown organisations in alerts while providing little clarity on what truly matters. Trusted Circles change that dynamic by enabling communities whether by sector, geography, or trusted partners to exchange intelligence in a secure, context-rich way.
Our AI orchestration then surfaces the “needle in the haystack,” correlating across years of telemetry to highlight what requires action. The result is operations that are faster, more collaborative, and more predictive. In essence, intelligence sharing becomes a force multiplier not just for individual organisations, but for the resilience of the region as a whole.
How can advanced protection be extended beyond large enterprises to strengthen the wider ecosystem in the Middle East?
Resilience can’t be a privilege for the few, it has to extend across the entire economy. The real measure of security is whether mid-sized businesses, service providers, and innovators can withstand the same sophisticated threats as large institutions.
In the Middle East, we’re seeing that shift: governments are setting clear frameworks, local infrastructure is enabling adoption with sovereignty, and service providers are multiplying enterprise-grade capabilities for the wider market.
The result is bigger than protection alone, it’s about building digital trust. And that trust is what allows economies to innovate, grow, and compete globally.
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