The Middle East, a region rapidly embracing Digital Transformation, finds itself at the forefront of a dynamic and challenging cybersecurity landscape. From burgeoning e-commerce platforms to critical infrastructure deployments, the region’s increasing reliance on digital technologies has simultaneously amplified its exposure to sophisticated cyberthreats.
As technology continues to advance at an unprecedented rate, its impact on various sectors will only deepen, reshaping the way we live, work and interact with the world around us. However, this digitalisation means the attack surface has expanded rapidly, with malicious actors presented with a plethora of opportunities to target organisations.
Against a backdrop of an increasingly complex and sophisticated threat landscape, and business challenges such as a cyberskills shortage and awareness training, Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) face multiple challenges as they strive to secure their organisations’ digital assets. The emergence of AI is also providing opportunities to attackers and the rising simplicity with which attacks can be executed is a concern among industry professionals.
However, AI also holds immense potential as a game-changer for defenders, providing advanced capabilities to strengthen cyberdefences and mitigate emerging threats.
To find out more about the current cybersecurity and IT challenges facing enterprises in the Middle East, CXO Priorities, in partnership with Recorded Future, surveyed 150 CISOs from across the GCC to find out about the key challenges they’re encountering, how they anticipate AI will impact the industry and how they’re planning for future investment.
In this month’s Secure Horizons feature, we take a look at this research and some of the key findings.
CISOs embracing AI
For the cybersecurity sector, AI has been referred to as a ‘double-edged sword’. While it offers significant advantages for defenders – particularly through proactive monitoring, automation and augmenting the well-reported skills gap – it has also been used to launch sophisticated attacks with worrying ease.
Despite this, many organisations are leveraging AI to stay ahead of evolving threats, with more than half of respondents already using AI or Machine Learning tools to enhance their cybersecurity. For almost one third, this technology is being used ‘extensively’, while 26% are using it in more limited applications. A further 21% plan to use AI tools in the near future, while the remaining 23% have no plans to. This may highlight the varying maturity levels of AI in cybersecurity across the region and, as this technology becomes better understood, may change.
The greatest advantage of using AI in cybersecurity, according to our respondents, is for proactive threat detection and prevention, with 29% of the vote. This is closely followed by improved efficiency in monitoring and incident response (26%). This result demonstrates how CISOs in the region perceive AI to be most impactful, enabling a more proactive cybersecurity posture. It will also support human workforces by automating many traditionally labour-intensive elements of the role.
Cybersecurity preparedness
CISOs across the GCC are managing a plethora of diverse, competing challenges and responses were split across several different areas. With a slightly higher percentage of the vote (29%), strengthening endpoint security is the top priority for the year ahead, followed by implementing advanced threat detection systems (27%).
These results highlight a clear focus on securing access points and devices – potentially driven by an increasingly remote workforce and sophisticated attacks on the endpoint, as well as the need for proactive threat detection. Organisations also recognise the need to address employee training and awareness and enhancing data protection and privacy measures, with both receiving 22% share of the vote. The findings demonstrate the need to balance ‘people and processes’ to ensure a strong overall cybersecurity strategy.
A significant number of organisations in the GCC are either maintaining or reducing their budgets, according to our research. In fact, more than 55% of respondents reported an overall boost to budget for the year ahead – 31% said this was by more than 10%, while for 25% there has been a slightly lower increase of less than 10%. However, 22% reported a budget that has decreased by more than 10% in 2025 and 22% said there had been no change.
Just over half (52%) of CISOs plan to invest more in threat intelligence in 2025 – indicative of the value seen in enhancing threat intelligence capabilities. With cyberthreats continuing to grow in complexity, the data shows that organisations understand the importance of taking a proactive approach to staying ahead of malicious actors. In contrast, 48% of respondents were not planning to boost their threat intelligence capabilities in the coming year. This could be due to budget constraints or due to prioritising other areas of cybersecurity.
While respondents were interested in several emerging technologies, Zero Trust architecture was selected by almost one third as being most impactful for the cybersecurity sector looking ahead. This has grown increasingly popular in recent times, as organisations have shifted away from a traditional perimeter-based security model, particularly with remote – or at least hybrid – working now the norm. Quantum Computing is also a focusarea, potentially due to its potential to impact encryption.
Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIP) (12%) and Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) (11%) are the tools that organisations are most commonly integrating with intelligence tools. This reiterates the importance that security teams are placing on automating and enhancing threat detection, response and intelligence sharing.
A total of 7% of respondents do not integrate intelligence tools at all, which could point to budget constraints, lack of expertise, or reliance on other security strategies.
The full report contains many more insights into the key cybersecurity challenges and priorities for CISOs across the region. To read the full report, click here.
