Marwan Alahmadi CEO, AL KHALIJIAH

Can you provide an overview of your business?

Al Khalijiah was founded in 2014 and does managed services in IT. For example, we focus on disaster recovery, and for two major banks that are our customers, we do their DR endto-end. So far, none of our customers have been attacked in the last five years; there were several cyberattacks in Saudi Arabia and the region but fortunately we are managing it in an efficient way. We also offer SaaS, subscription-based software, solutions, portals, and services running from the cloud to manage buses, for example. We are also getting into solutions for the back office of banks and insurance companies in settlement as well. AI and data science are the future, and unless we leverage that, companies will be left behind, which is why we are diversifying our services to capture the maximum value in the market.

What cybersecurity threats do companies face as they plan to grow?

We offer, for example, security operation centers (SOC) services, which manage security for the whole organization. In a SOC, all the traffic is analyzed in real time, and if anything happens, the solution intervenes immediately and proactively stops that threat or isolates it. Most of the impact of threats to organizations is not because the threats are unknown; sometimes it is mainly human errors of not updating parameters or software or managing updates or alerts. If companies ignore the alerts, they can become vulnerable to attacks. We offer end-to-end solutions, a combination of management operation and solutions.