Most Saudi, UAE firms concerned over data protection issues: EY

Majority of companies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates consider data protection and data privacy compliance a "growing concern", consultancy EY said on Monday.

In its third biennial "Global Forensic Data Analytics" survey, the consultancy said 60 percent of respondents from the two GCC nations expressed increasing concern about data protection and data privacy compliance, while 82 percent said they still don’t have a plan in place to comply with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The GDPR comes into force on May 25 and requires all businesses to strengthen the protection of personal data of all EU citizens in 28 member states.

The survey, however, said 100 percent of respondents in Saudi Arabia and UAE agreed that forensic data analytics (FDA) towards regulatory compliance has been effective. Majority of respondents also agreed that the full potential of FDA was reliant on investments in the right technology and sources.

FDA is the collection and analysis of all types of data with the objective to manage legal, compliance and fraud risks. It can be used to better monitor, prevent, and predict anomalies in business activities and transactions.

Meanwhile, EY said the majority of organizations in the two countries are making significant investments in emerging technologies, such as risk scoring, aggregation techniques, user behavioral analytics and social medial analytics, to help mitigate cyber risks and attacks.

The report revealed that 53 percent of Saudi and UAE companies are already using or likely to adopt robotic process automation compared with the global average of 39 percent.