Saudi Vision 2030 is the framework and program that is expected to accelerate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s transition towards being a hub of technological innovation and progress. As a result of these ambitious reforms technology has matured very quickly in the KSA IT ecosystem.
According to Uraz, the combination of the maturity of technologies and the implementation of new regulations has increased the need and demand for high-quality data protection.
“The KSA market has matured over the last few years, especially when it comes to data security. There is a lot of regulations that have come into place from the KSA government. We have a lot of regulators across different industry verticals, who are predominantly talking about data protection being one of the key requirements for compliance, not only across the government sector, but also amongst private enterprises too. This regulatory framework has helped us, because we are a leader in data protection and have the technologies to empower companies to protect their most valuable asset, which is of course data in the new digital economy”, said Uraz.
Seclore have been in the KSA marketplace for 7 years and work with some of the biggest brands from government to the private sector, and a testament to their phenomenal success has been the fact that one of the country’s biggest regulators is using their technology internally.
In addition to this, Uraz believes there is huge potential for further growth when it comes to data protection in KSA.
“We see huge market potential for data protection over the next 3 years. Our product offering has matured over the years, and we have a lot of new integration capabilities were as a security tool we can not only begin a journey with a customer, but we can also grow the security platform in multiple other applications across different verticals”, said Uraz.
Interestingly, Uraz highlighted that in the past despite the pain points always being in existence, customers were reluctant to invest in data protection technology.
“When we started out on our journey in the Saudi market we regularly spoke to prospective customers about our technology, but the feedback we got was this is very nice technology, but do we have to pay for it? The value add was just not there, however, the pain point was always there, but at that stage the customers were just not willing to budget for it and invest in data protection”, said Uraz.
Like many companies, the pandemic has actually accelerated their business and the demand for Seclore’s diverse and broad portfolio of solutions has increased as businesses adapted to their employees transitioning from the compounds of their physical office environment to a virtual one.
“The pandemic has helped us because so many people are working from home, and as a result there is a lot of the data being generated from outside the perimeter of the enterprise and a significant amount of confidential information is being handled by desktops outside of the network. Enterprises have recognised that this is a big issue that needs to be addressed and know that we have the technology to empower them”, said Uraz.
Uraz also stressed that remote access was another accelerator in the demand for effective, robust and resilient data protection solutions.
“We have a university, as a client and they took 4 years to decide whether they wanted to buy our technology or not, but never-the-less they still went for it because they had a lot of research data that they needed to protect. They were very worried about that data falling into the wrong hands. The remote access is something that has accelerated the requirements for data protection. In terms of digital rights management, we are complimenting these two technologies such as data classification and data loss prevention is helping us complete the entire data protection journey,” said Uraz.
