UAE hardens industrial cyber defences

Arabian Post Staff -Dubai

Abu Dhabi has moved to sharpen protection for factories, utilities and critical infrastructure after the UAE Cyber Security Council and Siemens signed an MoU to strengthen operational technology cyber resilience across industrial sectors.

The agreement, signed on the sidelines of the fifth Make it in the Emirates, creates a framework for cyber defence, knowledge sharing and local security capabilities. It calls for a Joint Innovation Center of Excellence dedicated to OT cybersecurity research, talent development and advanced solutions. The focus is not conventional office networks but systems that monitor and control machinery, plants, energy grids, transport networks and smart buildings, where a breach can interrupt production, expose safety risks or disrupt public services.

Under the MoU, the partners plan to deploy a Security Information and Event Management platform within the UAE using national cloud infrastructure, a step designed to keep security data close to operators and support data sovereignty. They will also assess secure alert-forwarding links between the UAE-hosted platform and Siemens systems in Germany, allowing incident teams to coordinate across borders when attacks move through multinational supply chains or vendor ecosystems.

The agreement also covers a phased expansion of Security Operations Centre capabilities based in the UAE, along with options to deploy Siemens’ SINEC Guard on UAE cloud infrastructure. That element is important because vulnerability mapping, asset visibility and prioritised remediation have become persistent weaknesses in industrial networks, where patching cannot always be carried out quickly and downtime can carry high economic costs.

Dr Mohamed Al Kuwaiti, Head of Cybersecurity for the UAE Government, described the partnership as part of the country’s National Cybersecurity Strategy and said the objective was a “secure, innovation-driven digital economy”. Mohamed Khalifa, Head of Digital Industries at Siemens in the Middle East, said cybersecurity had become a “foundation for economic competitiveness” as industrial operators connect production systems, analytics platforms and remote services.

The timing reflects a tougher global threat environment. Industrial security data for 2025 recorded 119 ransomware groups affecting more than 3,300 industrial organisations, a 49 per cent increase from 80 groups a year earlier, with manufacturing accounting for more than two-thirds of victims. Other threat assessments show exploitation of public-facing applications rising 44 per cent year on year, while active ransomware groups also increased by 49 per cent, underscoring how attackers are combining basic weaknesses, credential theft and automation to widen their reach.

For the UAE, the industrial stakes are expanding as manufacturing, logistics, utilities and smart-city platforms become more data-driven. The national Industry 4.0 agenda, advanced manufacturing investments and heavy use of connected infrastructure raise productivity, but they also blur the old boundary between IT and OT. A compromised engineering workstation, remote access gateway or virtualised server can deny operators visibility even when physical equipment remains intact.

The Siemens agreement fits a broader move towards sovereign cyber capability. The UAE Information Assurance Standard v2.1, released in November 2025, replaced the 2020 framework and placed the Cyber Security Council at the centre of national cyber governance. The updated standard brings together policies covering critical information infrastructure, cloud security, artificial intelligence, IoT, incident response, encryption, secure remote work and third-party risk, giving operators a more unified compliance baseline.

Siemens brings a large industrial cybersecurity footprint to the arrangement. The company’s global cyber team numbers more than 1,300 specialists and handles more than 1,000 incidents each month. Its wider critical-infrastructure portfolio includes energy grids, manufacturing plants, transport networks and smart buildings, while its managed detection and response services target energy suppliers, data centres, airports and other operators facing 24-hour monitoring requirements.

The MoU is still a framework rather than a finished operating model, and its impact will depend on execution: how quickly the joint centre is established, how information-sharing rules are structured, how industrial operators are onboarded and whether smaller suppliers gain access to practical support. The most difficult work will be aligning sovereign data needs with international incident response, while building enough local talent to sustain monitoring, engineering and forensic capabilities.