Help AG appoints new country director for Saudi Arabia

Help AG, the cybersecurity arm of Etisalat Digital, has appointed Fahad Al-Suhaimi as country director for Saudi Arabia.

Al-Suhaimi brings with him more than 15 years of experience in the technology industry. He joins Help AG from Innovative Solutions SA, where he held the role of vice president of sales and marketing. Before that, he served in management positions at Mobily, SAS, HP, the Saudi Telecom Company, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“Fahad’s extensive experience, network of public and private sector relationships, and understanding of the Kingdom’s threat landscape makes him the perfect addition to our team and reinforces our commitment to advancing the Crown Prince’s pioneering Vision 2030 digital transformation agenda,” said Stephan Berner, chief executive officer at Help AG.

Based in Riyadh, Al-Suhaimi will be responsible for leading business growth and expansion across the nation at a time when organisations are looking to further accelerate their digital transformation ambitions driven, in part, by the global Covid-19 outbreak but also as a key pillar in Saudi’s Vision 2030 plan to diversify its economy through increased focus on innovation.

“As the Gulf’s largest economy, there is a huge demand in the market for our services and solutions as organisations rapidly embrace digital technologies not only accelerated by the shift to cloud and multi-cloud environments during Covid-19 but also on account of Saudi’s national transformation plan that prioritises innovation to diversify the economy away from oil,” said Al-Suhaimi.

Read: Cysiv expands SOC-as-a-service operations to Middle East and Africa

Meanwhile, Help AG’s latest cybersecurity operations centre (CSOC) is set to launch in Saudi Arabia in the first half of 2021.

According to a recent IDC CIO Survey, 60 per cent of Saudi CIOs see managing security as their biggest ongoing technology challenge and 85 per cent of CIOs think that investments in cybersecurity and privacy technologies will be critical to their digital transformation initiatives. The report also predicts that the fallout from the pandemic is likely to expose new security loopholes that cybercriminals will exploit.

The CSOC will house security analysts and monitors to assess vulnerabilities and analyse and interpret critical security events or abnormal behaviour occurring within complex IT security infrastructures. The CSOC will support Help AG’s managed detection and response (MDR) service and incident response methodology, designed to inform and support organisations round the clock