The UAE and wider Middle East are facing a rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape as businesses expand their use of cloud services, hybrid IT environments and digital platforms, according to Gulf News. ManageEngine says organisations are increasingly dealing with ransomware, identity-based attacks, supply-chain vulnerabilities and AI-powered cybercrime. The company said the challenge for businesses is no longer limited to deploying security tools, but also ensuring visibility and resilience across cloud and on-premises infrastructure, endpoints, identities and applications. ManageEngine said digital identity has become a key part of enterprise cybersecurity, with human, privileged, machine and application identities operating across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It said traditional directory-based tools may not provide complete visibility across these environments, making directory-independent monitoring and access controls increasingly important. AI is also accelerating cyberattacks, including ransomware, by helping attackers identify vulnerable endpoints and move across networks more quickly. ManageEngine said organisations need a layered security approach combining endpoint protection, identity governance, AI-assisted threat detection and tested recovery systems. At the same time, AI is being used by security teams to analyse large volumes of data and speed up threat detection and response. ManageEngine said AI can help correlate security signals across different environments and automate tasks through tools such as Zia Agents. However, the company warned that uncontrolled adoption of AI can create additional security risks. Organisations need to understand what data AI tools can access and where that information is transferred. At GISEC Global 2026, ManageEngine is focusing on AI-powered automation through its proprietary agentic AI platform, Zia Agents. The company said Zia Agents can be deployed across its digital enterprise management suite to automate tasks within a secure and privacy-compliant framework. For cybersecurity operations, the platform can automate access reviews, alert correlation, investigations, endpoint detection and response (EDR) triage, and device diagnostics, reducing manual workloads for security teams.
AI-powered cybercrime raises security concerns for UAE businesses
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