When Veeam announced a definitive agreement to acquire California-based Securiti AI, it signalled a new era for artificial intelligence (AI). It unites the global leader in data resilience with the leader in data security posture management (DSPM), data access governance, AI security, and privacy – addressing one of the biggest challenges facing enterprises today: how to accelerate safe AI at scale.

Veeam is hosting a special event at the Jumeirah Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai on December 18, where top executives from both companies will be present, including Anand Eswaran, CEO of Veeam, and Rehan Jalil, CEO of Securiti AI. At this gathering, regional IT leaders and decision-makers will gain in-depth insight into the partnership, its strategic importance, and how the two companies unite to deliver a trusted data platform, designed to help organisations navigate and accelerate AI adoption safely in today’s data-driven world.

The Data Challenge in the Age of AI

Since the dawn of the digital era, organisations have struggled with limited visibility, trust, and resilience of their data. The rise of AI has brought these issues into sharp focus. Today, all organisational data – structured and unstructured – is accessed, combined, and acted upon at machine speed. Unstructured information that once sat idle in archives or file shares now powers AI copilots, agents, and generative models in real time. With AI, organisations need complete visibility of all their data: where it resides, who can access it, and whether it is protected and recoverable.

Why Visibility Matters

Every business is now a software business powered by data – structured data such as applications and databases, and unstructured data such as documents, PDFs, chats, images, and logs. While unstructured data was historically passive, AI enables new value from this data. Yet most organisations don’t know what data they have, where it is located, who can access it, and how it is being used. You cannot secure or govern what you cannot see.

The Trust Gap

Trust is another critical issue. AI projects fail or stall – 80–90 per cent of the time – not because models are flawed, but because data is incomplete, inconsistent, or non-compliant. Security, privacy, and compliance teams often operate in silos, and policies built for human speed cannot keep pace with AI.

Successful AI requires identity, privacy, and policy information to travel with the data – from creation, to backup, to the AI pipeline – with enforcement at the same speed as AI. Without this, organisations face risks ranging from bad data impacting AI models, to external threats such as prompt-injection leaks, model poisoning, and accidental exposure of regulated data.

Resilience in an AI World

Security risk is escalating. Nearly 70 per cent of organisations were hit by ransomware last year, and attack speeds are accelerating. AI also enables attackers to automate and scale exploits. Inside businesses, unchecked autonomous AI agents can propagate bad data or drift models at machine speed. Data resilience must evolve from simply restoring information to validating that data, models, agents, and embeddings are clean – and restoring only what is safe.

The State of the Data Economy in 2025

Three critical gaps – visibility, trust, and resilience – define the data economy today. They are symptoms of a deeper problem: fragmentation across data, identity, policy, and protection. AI is the accelerant, magnifying both opportunities and risks. Routine weaknesses have become enterprise-level vulnerabilities. Organisations must now see all their data, secure everything, and recover anything at machine speed.

The Innovation Paradox

As AI adoption accelerates across industries, enterprises face a challenge: how to innovate quickly while maintaining compliance, governance, and security. The Middle East exemplifies this challenge. Governments and enterprises are embracing cloud, automation, and AI at unprecedented speed – while meeting stringent data-sovereignty and privacy obligations.

Why Veeam and Securiti AI?

Veeam, long recognised as the global leader in data resilience from backup, to recovery, and ransomware protection, is focused on solving this dilemma. By acquiring Securiti AI, Veeam is bringing together a unified platform that encompasses an organisation’s entire data estate, while ensuring it’s protected, governed and managed – creating the foundation for trusted AI.

From Resilience to Governance: Completing the Data Story

This move reflects the rapid acceleration of AI adoption and the challenges of ensuring the right trusted data is available to power it. Veeam is expanding its trusted data resilience capabilities and integrating Securiti AI’s DSPM, privacy automation, and AI trust technologies.

Together, they will deliver a unified control plane that protects and governs data, enabling safe and scalable AI innovation. This approach eliminates the perceived trade-off between speed and risk, positioning resilience and governance as complementary pillars. It’s a natural evolution for Securiti AI, combining robust data resilience with advanced security and governance. The integrated platform will offer a single command centre for managing resilience, DSPM, privacy, governance, and AI trust across the entire data estate – unlocking AI’s potential while maintaining compliance and mitigating risk.

A Unified Control Plane for Trusted AI

Together they offer customers visibility and control over their data while ensuring it’s protected and can be recovered no matter what happens. Customers can have security, governance, and resilience at the heart of AI projects from the outset, ensuring rapid rollback and integrity validation when anomalies occur. Safety becomes an enabler of innovation, not a constraint.

Backup and recovery workflows will integrate seamlessly with DSPM policies, validating posture, permissions, and compliance before data is backed up or used for AI, establishing trusted AI at scale.

Industry analysts endorse this integration, noting that it bridges gaps between security, governance, compliance, and resilience. By
providing context-rich insights into data usage and access, the combined solution enables proactive risk defence, compliance assurance, and robust governance.

Defining AI Trust in Practice

AI trust means confidence that data is accurate, compliant, and safe for AI use. In practice, this involves lineage tracking, consent enforcement, and risk detection – ensuring AI models operate on governed, resilient data and reducing operational and reputational risks.

Why the Middle East Matters

The Middle East is advancing rapidly in digital transformation, cloud adoption, and AI deployment, supported by strong regulatory frameworks. Enterprises seek to innovate quickly while meeting compliance and sovereignty requirements. The combined Veeam–Securiti AI solution addresses these needs by delivering integrated resilience and governance, enabling organisations to move fast without creating risk.

Governments across the Gulf have introduced national AI strategies and data-protection frameworks, while sectors such as banking, energy, and telecom invest heavily in predictive analytics and generative AI. IDC forecasts AI spending in the region to exceed $6bn by 2026, underscoring the urgency for trusted AI solutions.

Navigating Sovereignty and Compliance

Hybrid environments present complex challenges for data sovereignty. The integrated platform offers visibility and control across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS environments, enforcing local compliance policies, while maintaining resilience and AI readiness. Early use cases in finance and government show how combining DSPM with immutable backups reduces risk and accelerates innovation.

Veeam’s channel-driven model will continue in the AI era, with new certifications, joint solution bundles, and region-specific programmes to help partners deliver integrated resilience and AI trust solutions. This enables managed service providers and system integrators to move beyond reactive protection toward proactive AI enablement.

Meeting Evolving Regulations

The acquisition anticipates emerging regulations such as the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and GCC data-sovereignty laws. Automated privacy checks and auditable governance workflows will allow enterprises to demonstrate compliance with evolving standards. Future dashboards will provide regulators with visibility into AI governance, lineage, and risk.

Competitive Advantage and ROI

The unified control plane combining resilience, DSPM, privacy, and AI trust differentiates Veeam in a crowded market. Customers benefit from reduced incidents, faster recovery, and safer AI launches, while procurement teams can consolidate spend and lower total cost of ownership.

As nations across the Middle East invest in AI research, smart-city initiatives, and sovereign-cloud infrastructure, trusted data and resilient systems are becoming strategic differentiators. The combined Veeam and Securiti AI platform aims to lead this transformation, enabling organisations to innovate confidently and compliantly. For enterprises across the region, trusted AI is no longer optional – it is the foundation for sustainable digital progress.

OpenAI announced the launch of GPT-5.2, the latest iteration in its flagship generative AI suite, designed to deliver deeper reasoning, enhanced productivity, and more trustworthy outputs for business and professional use. The rollout, which began on December 11, targets paid subscribers and enterprise developers, giving organisations access to upgraded capabilities that are purpose-built for complex workflows, data-intensive tasks, and multi-step decision support.

Strategic timing in a competitive AI landscape

GPT-5.2 arrives just weeks after GPT-5.1 and concurrently with rival announcements such as Google’s latest AI research agent, underscoring a broader “AI arms race” among leading technology companies. According to industry reports, OpenAI instituted a “code red” acceleration effort earlier this month to fast-track improvements and secure competitive advantage amid rising pressure from Gemini 3 and other advanced models.

Three tiers of capability for varied enterprise needs

The GPT-5.2 suite comprises three distinct modes tailored to business use:

• GPT-5.2 Instant: A fast, efficient engine optimised for everyday professional tasks such as research synthesis, documentation, and email drafting. Early feedback praises clearer explanations and more accurate informational output.

• GPT-5.2 Thinking: Designed for deeper analytical work, this mode excels in multi-step reasoning tasks, including financial modeling, spreadsheet automation, and long-document summarisation—features that resonate with analysts, consultants, and project teams.

• GPT-5.2 Pro: Positioned as OpenAI’s most capable and reliable model, Pro is targeted at high-stakes professional scenarios such as research assistance, complex coding tasks, and technical problem solving, with visibly fewer major errors on challenging queries.

Enterprise productivity and ROI gains

Benchmarks shared by OpenAI underscore notable performance improvements. Internal tests suggest GPT-5.2 outperforms its predecessor by significant margins on professional benchmarks, while real-world evaluations have highlighted its ability to boost workflow efficiency across sectors. For example, advanced spreadsheet tasks and large-scale data interpretation show marked gains in accuracy and consistency—core requirements for finance, consulting, and legal workflows, Business Insider reported.

Availability also extends to major enterprise platforms. On launch day, providers such as Databricks integrated GPT-5.2 into their data intelligence ecosystems, enabling organisations to build data-aware, agentic AI systems that interact safely with governed datasets and tools. These integrations underscore the commercial potential of GPT-5.2 for operational automation and analytics at scale.

Pricing and access

GPT-5.2 is generally available via the OpenAI API with multi-tier pricing that reflects its enhanced capabilities. While base access remains attractive for everyday business use, premium performance tiers such as Pro are priced higher to match the intensity and sophistication of enterprise workloads.

Across paid ChatGPT plans—Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise—organisations can now tap into the full GPT-5.2 model suite, with legacy models like GPT-5.1 remaining available temporarily to ensure smooth transition.

Outlook

For business leaders and technologists, GPT-5.2 represents a strategic addition to the AI toolkit. Its combination of deeper reasoning, broader context handling, and robust tool integration suggests meaningful returns for companies hoping to embed AI into core workflows—from product development and data analysis to customer support and automated decision systems.

OpenAI’s continued refinement of safety protocols and output reliability further strengthens confidence among enterprise adopters navigating regulatory and ethical considerations tied to large-scale AI deployment.

As momentum builds into 2026, GPT-5.2 is positioned not just as an incremental upgrade, but as a foundational platform for AI-augmented professional work, enabling organisations to rethink productivity, collaboration, and competitive advantage in an increasingly AI-driven world

The Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation (MoHRE) said that Thursday, January 1, 2026, will be an official paid holiday for all private-sector workers in the UAE to mark the New Year.

The ministry’s statement follows a circular issued in line with the cabinet’s approved list of public and private-sector holidays.

Jan 1 holiday for federal sector and Jan 2 will see remote working kick in

The Federal Authority for Government Human Resources has also confirmed that federal employees will observe the New Year holiday on Thursday, January 1, 2026, a WAM report shared.

Work on Friday, January 2, will move to remote mode for all federal staff except those whose roles require them to be on-site.

Parkin Company, Dubai’s leading provider of paid public parking facilities and services, has signed a landmark five-year agreement with DAMAC Properties, one of the UAE’s foremost real estate developers renowned for its iconic residential communities.

The partnership forms a key pillar of Parkin’s strategy to broaden its presence in the developer parking segment. Designed to ease traffic flow, enhance customer experience and optimise the utilisation of approximately 3,600 parking spaces across DAMAC’s prime developments in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the collaboration reflects both companies’ commitment to delivering smarter, more efficient urban mobility solutions. By drawing on its operational strengths and technology platforms, Parkin aims to introduce world-class parking standards across DAMAC’s communities, a Dubai Media Office report said.

Scope of work across high-profile towers

Under the agreement, Parkin will manage approximately 500 on-street parking spaces in DAMAC Hills 1, a popular and fast-growing residential destination.

The Company will also take over the operation of roughly 2,700 additional parking spaces across 44 residential and commercial towers in Downtown, DIFC, Dubai Marina and Business Bay in Dubai, as well as Al Reem Island in Abu Dhabi. The contract marks Parkin’s debut in the Abu Dhabi parking market, an important milestone as the Company advances its geographic expansion plans beyond its home base of Dubai.

Read more-New parking zones introduced in Dubai: What you need to know about tariffs

As part of the transition, Parkin will introduce a mix of visitor and permit-based parking options for short- and long-term users across DAMAC’s towers, commercial blocks and community malls. All participating locations will be seamlessly integrated into the Parkin mobile app, allowing customers to access and manage parking services via a single digital platform. The unified system is expected to significantly improve convenience, transparency and real-time accessibility for users.

Technology integration and rollout timeline

Implementation will kick off in Q1 2026, with a phased rollout to ensure operational continuity across DAMAC locations. Parkin’s advanced technologies, spanning access control, automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) and enforcement tools, will be integrated into DAMAC’s existing infrastructure to create a unified, scalable and efficient operating model.

The initiative is expected to strengthen operational reliability and support long-term growth as both entities work to redefine parking and mobility standards across mixed-use communities in the UAE.

Eng. Mohamed Abdulla Al Ali, CEO of Parkin, said, “This five-year partnership with DAMAC is a strong endorsement of Parkin’s three decades of expertise in technology, operations and enforcement. It reflects the value we deliver to partners and developers by applying our proven capabilities to some of the UAE’s most best-known communities. We are creating seamless, convenient parking solutions tailored to the needs of residents, visitors and tenants. In addition, expanding into Abu Dhabi marks a milestone in our growth strategy, as we extend our reach beyond Dubai. Together with DAMAC, we aim to set new benchmarks in customer experience, operational efficiency, and smart mobility across the UAE.”

Mohammed Tahaineh, chief project officer of DAMAC Properties, added, “Our unique communities are designed to deliver high standards of convenience, comfort and safety. Partnering with Parkin ensures that residents and visitors stand to benefit from world-class parking solutions powered by smart technology. This exciting collaboration underscores our commitment to enhancing the customer journey across our developments in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.”

Huawei has expanded its global device portfolio with the launch of four new flagship products unveiled at its “Unfold the Moment” event — the HUAWEI Mate X7, HUAWEI FreeClip 2, HUAWEI WATCH ULTIMATE DESIGN, and HUAWEI MatePad 11.5 S. The lineup reflects the company’s continued push into premium foldables, next-generation audio, luxury wearables, and creator-focused tablets.

Zhu Ping, President of Marketing and Sales Services at Huawei Consumer Business Group, said the company remains committed to bringing “warmth” to technology. “By understanding and responding to users’ real needs, we aim to help the world’s consumers use technology to unfold every moment. Our goal is not only to deliver exceptional product experiences, but also to enable every user to embrace the moments that matter most to them.”

Mate X7: Huawei’s latest flagship foldable

The HUAWEI Mate X7 introduces a slim, durable design inspired by the “Time-Space Gate” aesthetic and China’s brocade craftsmanship heritage. Available in Brocade White with a nano fiber finish and two vegan-leather options, the foldable is positioned as the brand’s first slim foldable with full flagship-grade imaging capabilities.

Its upgraded second-generation True-to-Color Camera system delivers a 43 per cent improvement in colour accuracy, supported by an Ultra Lighting HDR Camera, Ultra-Wide Camera and Telephoto Macro Camera with up to 17.5 EV Ultra Lighting HDR Video. The phone also incorporates Huawei’s Ultra-Reliable Foldable Architecture with Crystal Armor Kunlun Glass and a new hinge system, alongside a graphene-based heat dissipation setup and a 5,600 mAh battery.

FreeClip 2: Open-ear audio meets fashion

Huawei’s FreeClip 2 earphones introduce an ear-clip design aimed at blending audio technology with fashion. Weighing just 5.1g per earbud, they support all-day comfort and come in Blue, White, Black and a new Rose Gold colourway.

Powered by high-energy dual-driver units and an NPU AI processor delivering 10x the performance of the previous generation, the earphones offer improved audio clarity, call quality and up to 38 hours of total battery life. The earphones are IP57-rated for dust and water resistance.

WATCH ULTIMATE DESIGN: Luxury and engineering

The new WATCH ULTIMATE DESIGN arrives in a Royal Gold Edition featuring a rare-earth purple ceramic bezel with 18K gold, coupled with a zirconium-based liquid metal case and purple-gold titanium alloy strap.

The smartwatch offers advanced features for divers, including a next-generation waterproof system and sonar-based underwater communication. Other enhancements include upgraded connectivity through a new antenna system, AI-powered noise cancellation, high-precision tracking using the HUAWEI Sunflower Positioning System, and expanded eSIM capabilities.

MatePad 11.5 S: Creator-ready productivity

Aimed at digital creators, the HUAWEI MatePad 11.5 S uses a PaperMatte Display engineered to reduce glare while maintaining clarity — addressing one of the longstanding limitations of matte displays. It ships with an M-Pencil Pro stylus and magnetic keyboard for paperless productivity.

The tablet integrates creativity-focused apps such as Huawei Notes, GoPaint (now featuring animation tools), Wondershare Filmora with shortcut key support for editing workflows, and WPS Office for PC-level document tasks.

Huawei said the launch embodies the company’s long-term consumer-first philosophy. Under its “Now Is Yours” brand proposition, Huawei aims to foster “cross-regional and cross-cultural connections” and create a more inclusive technology ecosystem globally.