Maya Zakhour – Director of Partner Ecosystem at BeyondTrust

As organisations across the Middle East accelerate Digital Transformation and AI adoption, identity security is becoming a critical foundation for cyberresilience, compliance and operational continuity. Maya Zakhour, Director of Partner Ecosystem at BeyondTrust, tells us why channel partners are playing a pivotal role in helping organisations across the region implement identityfirst security strategies that secure both human and non-human identities across increasingly complex environments. must be able to withstand and recover from identity-based attacks, not just detect them. Identity security is no longer a purely technical concern: it is a Business Continuity imperative.

How is identity management evolving as a core pillar of modern cybersecurity strategies? Identity has fundamentally replaced the network perimeter as the defining frontier of security. For years, organisations in the Middle East, like their counterparts globally, focused their defences on protecting the edges of their infrastructure. But attackers have long since moved past those barriers. The majority of breaches today involve compromised credentials or abused privileged access, which means that if you cannot control identity, you cannot control your security posture. Essentially, you can’ t protect what you can’ t see.

What we are seeing across the UAE and the Middle East is a genuine maturity shift, accelerated by the ambitious Digital Transformation agendas underway here. The

UAE’ s push to become a global AI hub and the smart city investments across Saudi Arabia and the Gulf are creating extraordinarily complex environments: hybrid cloud, SaaS, OT, where identity sprawl is growing faster than many security teams can manage. Critically, the threat is no longer only about human identities. As Agentic AI proliferates, every autonomous agent, service account and automated workflow represents a potential attack path. Securing all of those identities, with the same rigour as human users, is what modern identity security demands, and it is a conversation that is becoming very real, very quickly, across this region.

Operational resilience is increasingly part of that same conversation. Governments and regulators across the Gulf are making clear that critical infrastructure operators( in energy, finance, healthcare and utilities)

What role do channel partners play in helping organisations implement and manage identitycentric security solutions? Partners are absolutely central to how identity security gets delivered across the Middle East. The region is very diverse, organisations have varying maturity levels, and there are several regulatory requirements. Working side-by-side with BeyondTrust, partners bring contextual knowledge of local industries, compliance frameworks and the specific operational realities, as well as the pre and post deployment services.

At BeyondTrust, our go-to-market model is very focused on the channel, not just supported by it. When an organisation in Riyadh or Abu Dhabi is beginning an identityfirst security journey, they need guidance from someone who understands their business, the local regulatory landscape, and can

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