Tech News
Boston Consulting Group Unveils Report on Global Cybersecurity Talent Shortage at Global Cybersecurity Forum 2024
 
																								
												
												
											Boston Consulting Group (BCG), in collaboration with Global Cybersecurity Forum (GCF), unveiled its “2024 Global Cybersecurity Workforce Report” at the GCF Annual Meeting 2024. Titled “The Global Cybersecurity Workforce Shortage and Skills Gap: A Threat We Cannot Ignore,” the report highlights a significant global shortfall in cybersecurity professionals despite considerable infrastructure and talent development investments. The GCF Annual Meeting 2024, themed “Advancing Collective Action in Cyberspace,” focuses on enhancing multi-stakeholder collaboration to address key cybersecurity challenges.
Cybersecurity Workforce Crisis
The report highlights that only 72% of cybersecurity roles are currently filled, leaving organizations vulnerable to rising cyber threats. The global cybersecurity workforce stands at 7.1 million professionals, with Asia-Pacific holding the largest share, while Africa faces severe underrepresentation with fewer than 300,000 professionals.
Amidst this workforce shortage, Generative AI (GenAI) is transforming the cybersecurity landscape, with 70% of organizations already incorporating AI into their cybersecurity frameworks. This shift presents both opportunities and challenges. While AI can help address some workforce gaps, it also introduces new complexities. 58% of cybersecurity leaders express concern about AI-enabled adversarial techniques, such as more sophisticated phishing attacks or automated vulnerability exploitation, which could outpace traditional defenses. To address these evolving challenges, 60% of organizations are focused on continuous training and upskilling, aiming to equip their limited workforce with the skills needed to leverage AI effectively while defending against AI-enhanced threats.
Shoaib Yousuf, Managing Director and Partner at BCG emphasized the GCC’s advancements in the face of an increasingly complex cyber threat landscape: “The region’s cybersecurity capabilities have evolved significantly, driven by government initiatives like Saudi Arabia’s Cybersecurity Workforce Framework (SCyWF), embedding a strategic focus on capacity building through the recently announced UAE and Qatar national cybersecurity strategies. These initiatives highlight a steadfast commitment to protecting critical infrastructure and safeguarding sensitive data. Through targeted investments, international collaborations, and a proactive planning, the GCC is advancing its cybersecurity landscape and contributing to the evolving standards for a secure global cyberspace. By refining its cybersecurity frameworks and addressing emerging threats head-on, the region is solidifying its position as a global leader in cybersecurity, paving the way for a secure, future-ready digital ecosystem.”
Call to Action: A Roadmap to Success
The report emphasizes the urgent need to attract new talent, especially among underrepresented groups such as women, who comprise just 24% of the cybersecurity workforce globally. To address these challenges and build a future-ready workforce, the report outlines key strategic recommendations:
- Targeted and strategic outreach to underrepresented groups
- Embedding cybersecurity into organizational DNA
- National & academic campaigns for cybersecurity careers
- Building an inclusive, diverse, and supportive culture
- Clear career progression and development
- Adopting skills-based hiring practices
- Expanding the talent pool with inclusive practices
- Fostering a culture of lifelong learning
- Integrating cybersecurity education from the ground up
- Evolving curriculum to meet industry needs
Vanessa Lyon, Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG emphasized the importance of collaboration: “To shape the cybersecurity workforce of tomorrow, leaders must collaborate to integrate cybersecurity into education, continuously upskill talent, and create opportunities for underrepresented groups. Building a future-ready workforce means fostering a culture of continuous learning, ensuring we have the skilled defenders to support global security and economic stability in the face of rapidly evolving technologies.”
The “2024 Global Cybersecurity Workforce Report” presented at the GCF Annual Meeting 2024 aligns with the Meeting’s theme of “Advancing Collective Action in Cyberspace.” This collaboration contributes crucial insights into the human capital required to navigate the evolving cybersecurity landscape. The report’s findings and recommendations provide a foundation for addressing key challenges in the cybersecurity domain, from talent shortages to integrating emerging technologies.
Tech News
New Rubrik Agent Cloud Accelerates Trusted Enterprise AI Agent Deployments
 
														AI agents represent the biggest opportunity and the biggest threat to organizations everywhere. Rubrik, Inc., the Security and AI Operations Company, today announced the launch of the Rubrik Agent Cloud to accelerate enterprise AI agent adoption while managing risk of AI deployments.
AI transformation is now mandatory for most organizations. However, IT leaders are constrained because Agentic AI has significant risks including hallucination as well as compromise by threat actors. Rubrik Agent Cloud is designed to monitor and audit agentic actions, enforce real-time guardrails for agentic changes, fine-tune agents for accuracy and, finally, undo agent mistakes. Built on the Rubrik Platform that uniquely combines data, identity and application contexts, Rubrik Agent Cloud gives customers security, accuracy, and efficiency as they transform their organizations into AI enterprises.
“IT and security leaders often don’t know what their AI agents are doing or how to undo their mistakes. Rubrik wants to help them answer: ‘What agents do I have?’ ‘What are they capable of doing?’ ‘How are they performing?’ ‘What did they do?’ and ‘Can I undo that when they screw up?’ said Bipul Sinha, CEO, Chairman, and Co-Founder of Rubrik. “AI agents have the potential to cause 10x the damage in 1/10 of the time. With Rubrik Agent Cloud, we uniquely address this challenge by leveraging our leadership in data, identity, and resilience to help our customers deploy AI agents with peace of mind.”
Accelerate Enterprise AI Deployment and Resilience
Rubrik Agent Cloud will offer comprehensive agent management capabilities that encompass the entire AI agent lifecycle – from observability and control to performance management and simulation.
- Agent Monitor:
- Auto-discovers both infrastructure-as-a-service (Azure/AWS) agents as well as platform-as-a-service (M365/AgentForce) agents.
 
○ Automatically discovers and maps active agents across popular agent builders such as OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot Studio, Amazon Bedrock and other popular agent building tools.
○ Continuously monitors agent activity and data access, and maintains immutable audit trails capturing context from data, identity, and applications.
- Agent Govern:
- Tracks agent usage, evaluates performance against prompts, and gives teams the tools to control destructive/undesired actions.
 
○ Defines and enforces agent behavior, access, and action policies in real-time.
○ A centralized tool to provide integration with enterprise identity systems—helping ensure secure, compliant, and controlled innovation.
- Agent Remediate:
- Announced in August 2025, Agent Rewind integrates with Rubrik Security Cloud to provide the industry’s only solution for precise time and blast radius rollback of undesirable or destructive actions.
 
○ Goes beyond observability to allow organizations to instantly undo unwanted or destructive actions, without any downtime or data loss.
○ Selective rollback of agent-driven changes ensures continuous protection for critical data and systems, and immutable recovery.
Tech News
UAE’s AI market set to soar to Dh170 billion by 2030, driving MENA’s Dh610 billion Artificial Intelligence boom
 
														The UAE’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) market is forecast to hit Dh170 billion (USD 46.33 billion) by 2030, according to new data from Grand View Research (GVR) in a study that underscores the country’s accelerating dominance in the region’s USD 166 billion (Dh610 billion) AI boom.
Close on the heels of the UAE unveiling its first Arabic-language AI model earlier this year, the new research by the California headquartered- firm reveals that the MENA AI market, valued at USD 11.92 billion (Dh43.7 billion) in 2023, is set to expand almost fifteen-fold to USD 166.33 billion (Dh610 billion) by 2030, growing at an annual rate of 44.8 percent.
“The Middle East, and especially the UAE, is no longer just an adopter of global AI technologies – it’s, in fact, shaping its own playbook,” said Swayam Dash, Managing Director at Grand View Research. “With sovereign funds backing innovation, and policies like the UAE’s new Strategic Plan 2031 leading the way with focus on utilising artificial intellegence in achieving greater financial efficiency for the federal government, the region is becoming a laboratory for how AI can drive both governance and growth.”
GVR’s report further highlights that nearly three in four UAE companies have maintained or increased their AI investments in the past year. Machine learning and deep learning remain the backbone of this transformation, particularly in healthcare, logistics, and financial services.
According to the report, the AI in Healthcare market in the Middle East and Africa, valued at USD 193.1 million (Dh 709 million) in 2023, is projected to reach USD 1.47 billion (Dh 5.39 billion) by 2030 growing at a CAGR of 33.6 per cent, while the region’s legal AI sector – currently at USD 43.3 million (Dh 159 million) – is expected to almost triple to USD 121.5 million (Dh 446 million) at a CAGR of 18 per cent over the same period.
“The release of region-specific AI metrics for the first time quantifies what many have sensed – that the UAE and its neighbours are at the tipping point of a generational transformation,” Dash added. “And the next wave of opportunity will come from specialisation. Sectors like healthcare and legal technology are still emerging here and hence the potential is immense. With the AI in regional healthcare market alone projected to touch USD 8.39 billion (AED 30.8 billion) by 2033, we’re looking at a decade of exponential growth. Likewise, the legal AI space, though currently small, represents a first-mover opportunity in digitising governance, compliance, and regulatory frameworks – areas where the Middle East can define its own benchmarks rather than follow global ones.”
The study also notes how the MENA region is further emerging stronger as one of the world’s most dynamic AI frontiers driven particularly by government-led digital transformation agendas, rapid urbanisation, and the rollout of AI-enabling technologies such as 5G, cloud, and IoT,
“Machine learning and deep learning continue to dominate adoption across smart-city initiatives, healthcare, and urban management – with the UAE leading the charge in real-world integration,” said Dash.
The full Grand View Research MENA AI Market Report offers an in-depth analysis of these evolving trends, uncovering how data, policy, and innovation are converging to redefine the region’s digital economy.
Tech News
FVC and SearchInform Join Forces to Boost Insider Threat Prevention and Data Protection in MENA
 
														FVC, a prominent distributor specialising in innovative technology solutions, is pleased to announce its strategic partnership with SearchInform, a leader in information security and insider threat prevention solutions. Together, they are committed to strengthening organizations’ defenses against data leaks, corporate fraud, human-factor related risks.
K.S. Parag, Managing Director, FVC:
“We are excited to welcome SearchInform to our cybersecurity portfolio. The company offers the most powerful and localized DLP on the MENA market. SearchInform solution stands out from the competition due to a number of advantages. The system can be deployed within a few hours, protects the maximum number of data transfer channels, provides smart content-based blocking for all controlled channels and also use digital watermarks to trace the source of potential leaks. SearchInform DLP supports analysis of data in Arabic and has security policies, tailored for requirements of local organizations, enabling timely detection and prevention of confidential data leaks. The solution leverages AI to monitor atypical data transfer channels, recognize graphic elements, transcribe audio into text, detect attempts to photograph PC screens with smartphones.”
SearchInform offers a range of products, including DCAP, DLP, and SIEM. All the tools are seamlessly integrated. Technical support is provided through a specialist assigned to the company, who has extensive experience thanks to clients from various fields.
Commenting on the Partnership, Artem Volodin, CEO SearchInform MENA, stated:
“We are proud to collaborate with FVC, whose expertise in the Middle Eastern market will strengthen our efforts to combat insider threats and data leaks. The region needs a comprehensive solution that will enable organizations to meet regulatory standards, including SAMA, PDPL, DCC, ECC, UAE Information Assurance (IA) Regulation etc. and global ones, such as GDPR, PCI DSS. SearchInform delivers tools for data protection and risk mitigation across all levels: FileAuditor secures file systems, DLP covers workstations and human risks, Risk Monitor addresses corporate fraud, and SIEM protects IT infrastructure.”
The partners are currently conducting expert training, partner enablement sessions, and are also negotiating the implementation of SearchInform products in local companies.
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