Beneath the world’s oceans lie one of the most significant technological achievements of our time, one whose scale and impact on daily life is rarely fully appreciated: subsea cables.

This vast network, stretching across ocean floors for hundreds of thousands of kilometers, forms the backbone of global communications. It is the primary channel for data flow, the enabler of high-speed internet services, and a driving force in connecting digital economies around the world.

Together with data centers, subsea cables are becoming increasingly essential to accelerating digital transformation and supporting the infrastructure modern economies depend on. As demand for data and digital services grows rapidly, these two pillars work in tandem. Subsea cables connect data centers across vast distances with high efficiency and low latency, ensuring instant and reliable data transfer, while enhancing operational efficiency and the quality of services delivered to users and businesses.

Read more-Saudi’s stc Group, SambaNova launch sovereign AI cloud platform

Against this backdrop, stc group has made strategic investments in building an integrated digital ecosystem across the region, expanding its data center footprint and strengthening international connectivity through subsea cables, reinforcing Saudi Arabia’s position as a global digital hub.

As the region’s leading digital enabler, stc group is executing a focused growth strategy across both sectors, cementing its role as a key connectivity node between three continents: Asia, Africa, and Europe.

Through its subsidiary center3, the group holds a stake in the 2Africa cable, one of the longest submarine cables in the world at 45,000 kilometers, and a strategic infrastructure asset designed to enhance international connectivity and accelerate data flows.

The group’s broader portfolio spans 25 data centers and investments in 16 subsea cables across three continents. Among the most notable significant is the Saudi Vision Cable, fully owned by the group through center3 and supported by four landing stations, forming a long-term strategic pillar for service continuity and data transfer reliability.

The 2Africa Pearls cable, the Gulf extension of the 2Africa system, marks another milestone in stc group’s global connectivity journey. Connecting more than 33 countries across Asia, Africa, and Europe, it supports the group’s international expansion ambitions, strengthens cross-border data flows, and reinforces stc’s role as a key driver of digital transformation worldwide.

The window between a cybersecurity vulnerability becoming public and an attacker exploiting it has collapsed from 23 days in 2025 to barely a day in 2026. No human watching dashboards can keep pace with that velocity.

At SHIFT Dubai, Fady Richmany, corporate VP and general manager for emerging markets at Commvault, explains why AI-powered threat detection is no longer optional, and why the real advantage now sits with organisations that have stopped trying to prevent breaches and started building to recover from them at speed.

How can AI help identify cybersecurity threats faster? Please provide a percentage and how many threats has it been able to identify in this year so far?

The honest answer is that speed has become the whole game. The window an attacker needs to move from a vulnerability becoming public to actively exploiting it has fallen from around 23 days in 2025 to barely a day in 2026, according to PwC, and a human watching dashboards simply cannot keep pace with that anymore. What AI does well is sit across enormous volumes of data and identity activity and recognise the patterns that signal something is wrong. This would include aspects like an unusual access request, or a privilege that quietly changes, or data that starts moving when it should be sitting still. AI surfaces those signals in near real time rather than days later, and that is the difference between containing an incident and explaining one afterwards.

The industry numbers support this. IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report found that the global average breach cost fell by 9 per cent year on year, the first decline in five years, and the reason was faster detection and containment driven by AI-enhanced tools. The organisations using AI and automation extensively identified and contained their breaches 80 faster than everyone else and saved close to $1.9m in the process. The catch is that only about a third of organisations are using it that way today, so the advantage still sits with a minority who have embraced it.

At Commvault, we put AI to work in exactly this place, watching for anomalies across data and identity, drawing on third-party threat intelligence so we are never relying on a single view, and pointing customers to a clean recovery point the moment something looks wrong.

What best practices should organisations adopt when implementing AI-related cybersecurity solutions?

Start with the data, because every AI system is only as trustworthy as the data feeding it. If that data is poisoned or quietly tampered with, the integrity of everything downstream is compromised, so you need to know what you hold, classify it, and govern who and what is allowed to touch it before it ever reaches a model or an agent. That governance piece is exactly why we recently brought Satori into the portfolio.

The second thing is identity, and I would place it close to the top. AD is one of the hottest threat vectors for bad actors to exploit. Nine out of ten attacks target AD because it controls access to data, systems, and applications – without it, business operations can grind to a halt. Agentic AI is multiplying the problem, because every autonomous agent you deploy is effectively a new identity, a non-human one that lives on data and becomes its own door into the environment.

Protecting identity on its own is no longer enough. It has to be wired together with your data security and your recovery so that the three areas work as one discipline rather than three teams who only meet during a crisis.

The third is to accept that you will be breached one day and to build for that eventuality well in advance. Strong walls are necessary and you should still build them, but I always say that resilience begins where security ends. So, the real question becomes, how cleanly and how quickly you can recover when something gets through? That means testing recovery continuously rather than once a year, keeping a known clean copy you can actually trust, and rehearsing with the security and infrastructure teams in the same room. We wrap all of that into what we call resilience operations, or ResOps, which treats resilience as a living operating model built on people, process and technology rather than a tool you switch on and forget.

What are some common challenges and mistakes made by organisations in deploying AI cybersecurity solutions?

The most common and most damaging mistake is leaving the work in silos. In a large enterprise, you typically find one team running the collaboration platforms, another running infrastructure, another handling backup and recovery, another in security operations, and another in analytics. On an ordinary day, that division of labour looks perfectly sensible. The moment a cyber incident lands, it becomes chaos, because five or six departments who have rarely spoken to each other suddenly have to coordinate while forensics are still working out what happened and how far it spread. We call that the ‘IT collision’, and if those teams have never run the drill together, it is the hardest position an organisation can find itself in.

The second mistake is pouring the entire budget into prevention. I have seen organisations spend a lot building the highest possible wall around the castle, and they still get breached, because someone always finds a way in. That money would go a great deal further if some of it were redirected toward the dark day when the breach actually arrives, so that the answer to “what now” is a resilient operation that can restore identity, data and operations at speed.

The third is deploying AI on top of data that nobody is governing. IBM found that 97 per cent of the organisations that suffered an AI-related breach lacked proper access controls around those systems, and that most had no governance policy in place at all. People rush to switch on the capability and worry about who can reach the underlying data afterwards, which is precisely the wrong order to do it in. Instead, organisations need to establish governance before deployment, with clear controls around data access, identities, and accountability. AI is only as trustworthy as the data and safeguards behind it.

What are some emerging AI cybersecurity trends?

The trend underneath all the others is the explosion of machine identity. We have spent years learning how to secure human users, and now every AI agent we deploy arrives as a new non-human identity that breathes on data and has to be governed and protected like any other. G42 Group CEO Peng Xiao has talked about building and deploying a billion agents, and when you sit with a number like that you realise the attack surface is expanding faster than most security models were ever designed to handle.

Alongside that, attackers now have frontier AI in their hands, which is why the time from a vulnerability becoming public to it being exploited has collapsed from weeks to roughly a single day. The defensive response is AI against AI, using intelligence to spot the anomaly and point to the clean recovery point faster. We are also seeing data governance move to the front of the conversation, because both the value and the risk sit in the data feeding these models, and organisations are starting to govern how that data is used before it reaches an agent rather than after the fact.

Looking a little further out, resilience itself is becoming more predictive and more automated, with systems that can forecast where a recovery might fail and increasingly detect, validate and recover with far less human intervention. In the Middle East region, there is a particularly strong thread around sovereignty, where each country sets its own rules on where data lives and how it can be accessed, and the technology has to adapt to each of those rather than assume one model fits everyone.

What’s next for your business?

We are committed to our work for our customers and partners in the Middle East, and our SHIFT event in Dubai last week was the clearest signal of that. We used the keynote to talk about resilience reimagined for the AI era, we heard Dr Mohamed Al Kuwaiti, head of Cyber Security for the UAE Government, set out the national picture with the UAE absorbing close to 800,000 attacks a day, and we announced the Commvault Innovation Centre of Excellence with the UAE Cyber Security Council in Abu Dhabi. That centre matters to me personally, because it is where we will sit with government and with universities to research, develop and train local talent in cyber resilience, and building that homegrown capability is how a country stays ready over the long term rather than the short.

Beyond that, our focus is on helping customers move from owning a recovery tool to running resilience as a discipline. We are bringing identity, data security and cyber recovery together on a single platform in Commvault Cloud Unity so that recovery is clean, fast and complete when it matters most, and we are continuing to extend that platform into the AI estate itself.

The thread running through all of it is simple to say and hard to do well. Resilience is no longer a back-office insurance policy, it belongs at the centre of how every AI-era business is designed and run, and our job is to keep making that achievable for the organisations and the nations we work with across the region.

Airbus said on Tuesday SAS had ordered 18 A330neo jets – part of what the Scandinavian airline described as a fleet modernisation plan involving up to 40 European long-haul aircraft worth $10bn, its largest ever investment.

The fleet renewal and expansion comes just two years after the airline, part-owned by Air France-KLM, came out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy following years of financial difficulties and a huge drop in traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic.

There were conflicting reports from companies involved in the mechanics of the deal, with engine maker Rolls-Royce announcing that it involved 20 new A330neo jets, which are powered by its Trent 7000 engines, plus options for another 10.

SAS said it was also bringing in an unspecified number of a predecessor model, the out-of-production A330-300 jet, to help it grow while waiting for the new upgraded models to be built.

The airline did not give a breakdown of new plane orders, future options or older leased planes but said the overall package of fleet investments was worth $10bn.

“These investments represent the most significant modernisation of the SAS fleet in decades, delivering substantial improvements in fuel efficiency, noise performance and customer experience,” SAS said in a statement.

Airbus no longer issues new aircraft prices but 18 A330neos would be worth $5.7bn at the last-published value.

Large discounts from such list prices are a standard practice when airlines ​place sizeable orders with planemakers.

The order follows SAS’ deal last year for 55 Embraer regional aircraft worth around $4bn.

Years of difficulties

SAS, founded in 1946 when the national flag carriers of Denmark, Norway and Sweden joined up, has struggled in recent years to compete with budget airlines.

Several share issues and restructuring plans failed to address underlying problems with high costs and low demand.

Chapter 11 bankruptcy allowed SAS to restructure debt of more than $2bn, to adjust its fleet and delist its stock with the new owners taking on a more profitable business.

In 2025, SAS, whose corporate headquarters are in Sweden, booked an operating profit of 3 billion crowns ($308.5m) on the back of higher passenger numbers and revenue. That compared to an operating loss of 2.1 billion in 2024.

Its expansion plans comes as the airline industry faces significant challenges from the conflict in the Middle East, which has driven up jet fuel prices and disrupted key air corridors.

Bloomberg reported earlier this month that SAS was nearing a deal with Airbus for widebody jets after running a contest between the European planemaker and Boeing.

SAS said its plans include a significant expansion at Copenhagen Airport, its main airport hub, towards 2030, supporting an additional 25,000 jobs and contributing 25 billion Danish crowns ($3.81bn) to Denmark’s GDP by 2030.

Oil prices slipped on Tuesday, and were set for their biggest quarterly loss since the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, with investors eyeing potential US-Iran talks in Doha amid a strained interim ceasefire in the four-month-old war.

Brent August crude futures, which expire on Tuesday, were down 0.41 per cent, or 30 cents, at $72.85 a barrel as of 0824 GMT. The contract was on track for a third straight monthly decline and was down about 21 per cent so far in June. The more actively traded September contract was down 0.1 per cent, or 7 cents, at $73.84 a barrel.

US West Texas Intermediate for August fell 0.2 per cent, or 13 cents, to $70.62 a barrel. The contract was down for the second straight month, by about 20 per cent so far in June.

Read more-UAE cuts fuel prices for July after four months of increases

Both Brent and WTI prices are close to pre-war levels.

“The recent de-escalation between the US and Iran is undoubtedly a positive development for global financial markets, but it should not be interpreted as the end of uncertainty surrounding the energy sector,” Rania Gule, senior market analyst at XS.com, said.

Iranian and US negotiating teams were due in Doha this week, but Iran said on Monday no meeting had been scheduled as weekend missile fire from both sides tested the interim ceasefire to end the war.

Iranian and Omani experts will start talks on redefining transit paths through the Strait of Hormuz in the coming days, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi told state TV on Monday, adding that his country will try to obstruct vessels outside defined paths.

However, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said there will not be any negotiation meetings at any level with the American side in the coming days.

The uncertainty over whether the two sides would meet highlighted the fragility of a June 17 agreement to pause fighting that has disrupted global oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz and posed a political challenge for US President Donald Trump ahead of November’s congressional elections.

Morgan Stanley cut its 2027 Dated Brent forecast by $5 a barrel, to $75 a barrel in the first half of the year and $70 a barrel in the second half, citing expectations of a build-up in OECD commercial oil inventories.

Morgan Stanley said it now models an implied global oil market surplus of 4.8 million barrels per day in 2027.

Middle East producers are pushing ahead with loading oil and LNG despite fresh ship attacks in the Strait of Hormuz and renewed strikes between the US and Iran in recent days, shipping data showed.

Traffic last week hit its highest level since the conflict began at the end of February.

Saudi employers are among the world’s most enthusiastic adopters of artificial intelligence (AI) in human resources, with AI now supporting key HR functions across most organisations, according to new research commissioned by HireRight.

The YouGov survey found that just 7 per cent of Saudi employers said their organisations were not yet using AI in HR, compared with 42 per cent of employers in the UK. AI is most commonly used in the Kingdom for training and development, HR administration, policy management, workforce planning and analytics.

The research also found Saudi employers are among the most accepting globally of candidates using generative AI during the recruitment process. Nearly two-thirds (63 per cent) view candidate use of AI positively, matching India as the highest among the markets surveyed and well above the global average of 46 per cent. Around 76 per cent of respondents said they were confident they could identify AI-assisted job applications, while 45 per cent expect AI to drive increased hiring in 2026 as organisations seek workers with new skills.

“Saudi Arabia is undergoing an ambitious workforce and economic transformation,” said James Randall, Middle East sales director at HireRight. “What stands out in this market is not simply the pace of AI adoption and its widespread acceptance by HR teams; it is the seriousness with which employers are approaching workforce integrity and long-term workforce quality.”

Unlike many international markets, finding qualified candidates was identified as a major challenge by only 23 per cent of Saudi employers, the lowest among all countries surveyed. Instead, organisations are prioritising recruitment transformation through technology integration, improved hiring efficiency and enhanced candidate experience.

Despite this focus on modernisation, employers continue to face workforce pressures. Compared with global averages, Saudi organisations reported higher-than-expected employee turnover (37 per cent versus 24 per cent globally), lower offer acceptance rates (35 per cent versus 18 per cent) and higher recruitment costs (33 per cent versus 28 per cent).

The survey also highlighted the growing importance of workforce screening. More than half (57 per cent) of Saudi HR and recruitment leaders said they had uncovered identity fraud among candidates or employees in 2025, the third-highest rate across the eight markets surveyed, behind only the UAE and India.

Accuracy and quality of screening results emerged as the top consideration when selecting a background screening provider, followed by candidate experience, customer service and ease of use. Employers said screening plays a critical role in improving workplace safety, reducing fraud-related financial losses and identifying behaviours that may conflict with corporate values.

Beyond permanent employees, 91 per cent of Saudi respondents said they also screen vendors, suppliers and contractors before engagement, although 59 per cent acknowledged that contingent workers are not screened through the same provider used for permanent hires, potentially creating gaps in workforce oversight.

“As businesses continue to strengthen their workforce risk management strategies, consolidating contingent worker screening with their current pre-employment screening provider could help companies introduce more consistent due diligence across their entire workforce,” Randall added.

The findings suggest Saudi organisations are combining rapid AI adoption with stronger governance and workforce screening as they build more efficient, technology-enabled recruitment models aligned with the Kingdom’s broader economic transformation.