A Crisis-Ready Cyber Workforce: Enhancing Workforce Readiness and Stakeholder Confidence

As organizations across Saudi Arabia increasingly embrace a digital-first strategy, they are integrating advanced AI technologies, expanding their Industry 4.0 transformation initiatives, and adopting diverse computing platforms across edge, core, and cloud. These advancements collectively expand the threat landscape by introducing new vulnerabilities, attack vectors, and complexities in responding to dynamic threats. According to IDC's Security Survey 2024, 60% of Saudi entities anticipate that their cyberdefenses will be overwhelmed by cyberattacks within the next two years. In response to this looming challenge, resilience becomes essential for organizations to stay ahead of adversaries. This IDC keynote will explore the current state of digital and cyber resilience among Saudi entities, highlighting key metrics on workforce preparedness to ensure robust defense against emerging threats.

The rampant growth and ever-changing nature of cyberthreats in today's modern cyberthreat landscape presents unique challenges, driving an even stronger focus toward agility and adaptability of organizational response capabilities. Coupled with this, recent studies continue to highlight the prevalence of the human factor in today's successful breaches — Verizon's 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report found that 74% of all breaches are caused by human error. These colliding realities drive us toward the inevitable conclusion that a modern strategy to face modern threats needs to be human centric, adaptable, and continuously evolving to deliver an always-relevant outcome in a people-first approach.