Abdullah Al Khorami, Chief Business Officer at Etihad Salam Telecom, underscores the Kingdom’s push toward secure, resilient digital infrastructure, enabling critical sectors to operate confidently as Saudi Arabia accelerates nationwide transformation.
Saudi Arabia has already turned digital activity into a material share of its economy. The digital economy now accounts for 15.6 per cent of GDP, according to the General Authority for Statistics. Every sector the Kingdom is modernising, from energy and manufacturing to healthcare and finance, is moving core operations onto connected infrastructure. That shift creates value. As more of the economy runs on software, sensors and data, the security of that layer becomes the condition on which the rest of the transformation depends.
Saudi Arabia is investing in protection at the same pace it is building its digital economy. The Saudi cybersecurity market reached USD 2.87 billion in 2025 and is forecast to reach USD 7.54 billion by 2034. The Kingdom is putting security at the centre of its digital plans. The economics support that commitment. IBM puts the average cost of a single data breach in Saudi Arabia at SAR 27 million, and that figure explains why resilience now belongs on the board’s agenda alongside growth.
That commitment starts at the top. Saudi Arabia holds a Tier 1 role-modelling position in the United Nations ITU Global Cybersecurity Index, and it holds the top global rank for cybersecurity in the 2025 IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook. The National Cybersecurity Authority has set a clear and demanding standard for the whole economy. That national foundation is strong, and it gives every enterprise in the Kingdom a platform very few markets can match. The opportunity now is to carry that same standard into daily operations across every sector, which is where large-scale digital transformation everywhere meets its hardest test. Across markets, BCG finds that around 70 per cent of digital transformations fall short of their targets, and the reason is almost always delivery. The complexity of building, integrating and operating these systems safely at scale is the real work, and it is work Saudi Arabia is well placed to lead.
Resilience has to be engineered into the network itself. It cannot be added as a final layer once the systems are already live. This matters more as connectivity carries heavier operational loads. A recent mmWave 5G trial in the Kingdom reached 6.9 gigabits per second and sustained multi-gigabit private-network performance over several kilometres, enough to run automation, robotics and predictive maintenance in sectors such as oil and gas, mining and manufacturing. When the network becomes the control system for a plant or a logistics operation, the security of the network and the continuity of the operation become the same objective. Protection belongs in the connectivity layer, close to the traffic and the machines it defends.
This is the argument for consolidating the capability under one accountable operator. Connectivity, 5G, cloud, artificial intelligence and managed security have converged into a single technical problem. Splitting that problem across many disconnected vendors is how execution gaps open in the first place. The operators best placed to close the gap are the ones moving from selling connectivity towards delivering technology outcomes, and taking responsibility for design, integration, operation and defence under one line of accountability. That model turns cyber resilience into a capability an enterprise can operate with confidence, backed by an operator that already runs critical national infrastructure every day.
Trust is the real currency in this shift. Enterprises, regulators and citizens commit to digital systems at the speed they trust them, and they trust them to the degree those systems keep running under pressure. Cyber resilience is what earns that trust, and trust is what sets the pace of adoption across an entire economy. Every system that stays secure and available adds to that confidence, and confidence is what allows the next wave of investment to move quickly.
For Saudi Arabia, the transformation is no longer a question of intent or investment. Both are firmly in place. The Kingdom has the strategy, the capital and the national cybersecurity standing to lead. The task now is delivery, and secure, resilient execution is what converts that standing into results the Kingdom can depend on. For the industries embarking on this path, the measure of success is what they can build, connect and defend, and keep running when it is tested.