Saudi Arabia Essential Cybersecurity Controls (ECC)

Essential Cybersecurity Controls

Essential Cybersecurity Controls have been created with cybersecurity needs of all organizations and sectors in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in mind. There are minimum cybersecurity requirements with which organization must comply.

The controls are designed to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of an organization’s information and technology assets. And the controls revolve around the four pillars of people, technology, processes, and strategy.

The Essential Cybersecurity Controls are organized into five main domains:

• Governance
• Defense
• Resilience
• Third-Party and Cloud Computing, and
• ICS Cybersecurity.

Some important highlights and challenges of the Controls are the following:

• The cybersecurity controls represent the minimum standards with which “all organizations and sectors in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” must comply.
• Not all controls are applicable to all organizations. The applicability of this framework depends on the nature of the business activities that the organization is carrying out. For example, an organization using a cloud hosted solution would be subject to Subdomain 4.2, Cloud Computing and Hosting Cybersecurity. Organizations are therefore advised to perform an assessment if they are subject to the provisions of the ECC controls.

Thales’ guide to Saudi Arabia ECC

The development of the ECCs is a crucial and vital step towards increasing the cybersecurity posture of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Organizations subject to the Controls can take advantage of top-level industry solutions and use existing frameworks such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework as guidelines.

Thales, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions and services, can help the Saudi Arabian organizations become compliant with the Essential Cybersecurity Controls.

Cybersecurity Governance Domain

Thales offers a variety of data protection professional services designed to help you effectively take your investment and ensure a successfully deployment. These services include:

• Best practices and awareness workshops for learning about the latest security trends and practices, managing governance risk and compliance and implementing data protection
• Strategy and design for identifying stakeholders and assigning roles and responsibilities
• Implementation and operations such as on-site product training, installation and customization of Thales products.
• Assessment to help your organization prepare for upcoming security audits while reviewing existing environment and business needs.

Best practice security solutions

Best practice for securing the integrity and confidentiality of sensitive data against loss, damage, unauthorized destruction, and unlawful access is strong access management and authentication combined with transparent encryption, integrated cryptographic key management, and security intelligence. Thales provides the following solutions to help organizations comply with Saudi Arabia’s Essential Cybersecurity Controls.

Data discovery and classification

The first step in protecting sensitive data is finding the data wherever it is in the organization, classifying it as sensitive, and typing it (e.g. PII, financial, IP, HHI, customer-confidential, etc.) so you can apply the most appropriate data protection techniques. It is also important to monitor and assess data regularly to ensure new data isn’t overlooked and your organization does not fall out of compliance.

Thales’ CipherTrust Data Discovery and Classification efficiently identifies structured as well as unstructured sensitive data on-premises and in the cloud. Supporting both agentless and agent-based deployment models, the solution provides built-in templates that enable rapid identification of regulated data, highlight security risks, and help you uncover compliance gaps. A streamlined workflow exposes security blind spots and reduces remediation time. Detailed reporting supports compliance programs and facilitates executive communication.

Protection of sensitive data at rest

Separation of privileged access users and sensitive user data

With the CipherTrust Data Security Platform, administrators can create strong separation of duties between privileged administrators and data owners. CipherTrust Transparent Encryption encrypts files, while leaving their metadata in the clear. In this way, IT administrators -- including hypervisor, cloud, storage, and server administrators -- can perform their system administration tasks, without being able to gain privileged access to the sensitive data residing on the systems they manage.

Separation of administrative duties

Strong separation of duties policies can be enforced to ensure one administrator does not have complete control over data security activities, encryption keys, or administration. In addition, the CipherTrust Manager supports two-factor authentication for administrative access.

Granular privileged access controls

The CipherTrust Data Security Platform can enforce very granular, least-privileged-user access management policies, enabling protection of data from misuse by privileged users and APT attacks. Granular privileged-user-access management policies can be applied by user, process, file type, time of day, and other parameters. Enforcement options can control not only permission to access clear-text data, but what file-system commands are available to a user.

Strong access management and authentication

Thales Access Management and Authentication solutions provide both the security mechanisms and reporting capabilities organizations need to comply with data security regulations. Our solutions protect sensitive data by enforcing the appropriate access controls when users log into applications that store sensitive data. By supporting a broad range of authentication methods and policy driven role-based access, our solutions help enterprises mitigate the risk of data breach due to compromised or stolen credentials or through insider credential abuse.

Support for smart single sign on and step-up authentication allows organizations to optimize convenience for end users, ensuring they only have to authenticate when needed. Extensive reporting allows businesses to produce a detailed audit trail of all access and authentication events, ensuring they can prove compliance with a broad range of regulations.

Protection of Sensitive Data in Motion

Thales High Speed Encryptors (HSEs) provide network independent data-in-motion encryption (Layers 2,3 and 4) ensuring data is secure as it moves from site-to-site, or from on-premises to the cloud and back. Our HSE solutions allow customers to better protect data, video, voice, and metadata from eavesdropping, surveillance, and overt and covert interception—all at an affordable cost and without performance compromise.