ياهلا بوابة السفر والسياحة
Saudi Arabia’s digital economy now accounts for roughly 15 percent of national GDP. A growing share of that value depends on digital services that must stay available: government platforms, banking channels, logistics systems and industrial operations. When those services stall, public services, customer trust and investment confidence stall with them.
That is why geopolitical uncertainty, more sophisticated cyber threats and tighter expectations from regulators such as the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) and the National Cybersecurity Authority (NCA) have pushed operational resilience beyond traditional disaster recovery. The question for leaders is no longer how quickly they restore a failed site but how they can keep business services running while disruption is underway.
Resilience as a growth foundation
Resilient digital infrastructure is central to the Kingdom’s non-oil growth story. High-growth sectors such as fintech, logistics, digital tourism and advanced manufacturing depend on continuous data flows and predictable service delivery. Large-scale giga projects add another layer of demand: IoT networks, smart infrastructure and real-time operations cannot absorb prolonged downtime.
That is why Saudi organisations are increasingly standardising on open hybrid cloud platforms such as Red Hat Openshift and on automation. They need greater continuity, clearer control over sensitive workloads and the flexibility to support a digital economy that is still expanding. According to the Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA), artificial intelligence is projected to contribute about USD 135 billion to the Saudi economy by 2030. That opportunity matters only if the platforms hosting AI and digital services remain available under pressure.
Open hybrid cloud for continuity and sovereignty
A multi-environment, open hybrid cloud approach is becoming central to resilience strategies in the Kingdom. Customers and partners need the portability to move applications across on-premises environments, private clouds and public cloud regions when business, regulatory or operational conditions change. Sensitive workloads can stay on domestic infrastructure to meet data residency and sovereignty expectations, while scalable capacity remains available where it is appropriate.
Industry examples already show this pattern in financial services. Riyad Bank needed faster delivery of digital banking services without stepping outside financial-sector requirements, and modernised on an open hybrid cloud foundation to bring new mobile banking capabilities to market. Fintech company neoleap, a subsidiary of Al Rajhi Bank, needed to accelerate secure application delivery for merchants and consumers, and modernised onto Red Hat OpenShift with consulting support from Red Hat. Al Rajhi Capital needed a unified digital platform for brokerage and investment services: with Red Hat as part of that modernisation, it established a more integrated technology foundation and saw brokerage business volume rise by 40 percent after launch. When platforms are resilient, customers can grow with confidence.
AI that can run under local control
Saudi Arabia has designated 2026 the Year of Artificial Intelligence. That national focus raises the bar for how enterprises put models into production. Customers need trusted data, governed infrastructure and the ability to run AI where compliance requires, whether on premises, in local cloud zones or at the edge.
Aramco’s Upstream Digital Center shows what that looks like in practice. Facing demand for safer, faster access to generative AI across upstream teams, it built a GenAI Foundation on an open hybrid cloud architecture so engineers and data scientists could centralise services, onboard models more quickly and reduce manual operational work. More recently, Zain KSA partnered with Red Hat because it needed a stronger digital backbone to expand enterprise AI applications without weakening governance or day-to-day stability. In both cases, resilience is treated as a property of the AI operating model, not an afterthought once models leave the lab.
Security as part of operational resilience
Customers adopting more open source components and AI services need supply-chain assurance and model governance alongside uptime. Industry efforts such as Lightwell, from IBM and Red Hat, help organisations remediate open source vulnerabilities at scale before they disrupt production. Community initiatives such as asago are building open approaches to AI safety and governance orchestration, helping connect policy intent to technical controls as AI moves into live operations. For Saudi enterprises facing SAMA, NCA and data-protection expectations, that discipline is becoming as important as classic disaster recovery.
Automation as everyday continuity
Automation turns resilience from a recovery plan into an operating habit. What customers need is fewer fragile manual steps, faster incident response and less firefighting when something fails. Consistent, repeatable automation across hybrid environments helps teams detect issues earlier, recover more predictably and keep critical services online.
What leaders should prioritise now
The priority for Saudi business and technology leaders is to keep critical applications and AI workloads from depending on any single proprietary infrastructure path. Customers and partners that standardise on open, portable platforms with automated operations gain the option to keep essential services under domestic control and still move workloads when conditions demand it. In the Year of Artificial Intelligence, and with Vision 2030 still accelerating, that combination of continuity, compliance, security and choice is what turns digital ambition into durable economic value.
