As organisations across the Middle East accelerate Digital Transformation and AI adoption, identity security is becoming a critical foundation for cyber-resilience, 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 identity-first security strategies that secure both human and non-human identities across increasingly complex environments.
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) 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.
What role do channel partners play in helping organisations implement and manage identity-centric 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 identity-first security journey, they need guidance from someone who understands their business, the local regulatory landscape, and can translate complex technology into meaningful, measurable outcomes. That is what a strong partner delivers. It is why we have increased the support to our partners through hands-on training and clear guidance on how to position privilege-centric identity security in real customer environments. The goal is always to shift organisations from reactive to proactive identity-led protection, and the channel is the engine that makes that happen at scale.
How can partners differentiate themselves in the growing Identity and Access Management market?
The IAM market is growing fast across the Middle East, which naturally means more competition. The partners who will stand out are those who go beyond product resale and position themselves as genuine identity security advisors. That shift, from transactional to consultative, is the single biggest differentiator available to the channel right now.
Practically, this means developing deep expertise in frameworks like Zero Trust and Least Privilege, building services capability around complex implementations, and being able to articulate the business value of identity security, not just technical features.
It also means thinking beyond the initial transaction. Platforms like BeyondTrust Pathfinder open significant expansion opportunities within existing accounts — once a customer has visibility into their identity risk posture, the natural next step is to extend controls across machine identities, Agentic AI workloads, and OT environments they had not previously secured. Partners who nurture that journey, growing alongside the customer rather than moving on after deployment, build recurring revenue streams and deepen their strategic relevance.
In this region, regulatory alignment then becomes the closing argument. Compliance with frameworks such as the UAE’s National Electronic Security Authority standards, Saudi Arabia’s Essential Cybersecurity Controls, and the various national data protection mandates across the Gulf is a real and pressing concern — and one that never goes away. Partners who can position identity security as both a risk management and compliance solution will build the kind of lasting customer relationships that no competitor can easily displace.
What challenges are organisations facing when adopting identity-first security models, and how can the channel help address them?
The biggest challenges are not technical — they are organisational. Many businesses across the Middle East understand the importance of identity security intellectually, but they struggle to know where to start, particularly when they have legacy environments, limited internal resources, or competing Digital Transformation priorities. The prospect of a large-scale identity overhaul can feel overwhelming, and that inertia creates genuine risk.
This is precisely where the channel is invaluable. A good partner meets customers where they are. Rather than prescribing an immediate end-state, they help organisations take a step-by-step, maturity-aligned approach: identifying the highest-risk areas first, delivering quick wins that build internal confidence and expanding the programme over time.
The BeyondTrust Pathfinder Platform was brought to customers with exactly this philosophy in mind. It provides unified visibility, intelligence, and control across human and non-human identities, and supports organisations in meeting their NESA, SAMA or NCA obligations, particularly for critical infrastructure sectors that require strict access control and supply chain security. The channel’s role is to make identity security feel achievable, not just aspirational.
How important is integration across platforms when delivering identity management solutions through the channel?
Integration is everything. An identity security solution that operates in isolation provides incomplete protection and creates friction for already stretched security teams. Organisations across the UAE and the wider Middle East region are running genuinely complex environments: on-premises infrastructure alongside multiple clouds, SaaS applications, OT networks in industrial and energy sectors, and now AI-driven workloads layered on top of all of it. An identity solution must provide visibility and control across all of those surfaces to be genuinely effective.
For partners, the ability to deploy solutions that integrate seamlessly with a customer’s existing SIEM, SOAR, EDR and cloud infrastructure is a real competitive advantage. It signals technical credibility and reduces deployment risk. The BeyondTrust Pathfinder Platform is built with this integration imperative at its core: connecting privileged access management with emerging identity use cases across hybrid, cloud, SaaS and OT environments, and doing so in a way that delivers scale-wide discovery of non-human identities, eliminates shadow access and maps critical paths to privilege. Partners who can deliver that integrated story to customers in this region become genuinely indispensable.
What opportunities do you see for partners as identity management continues to expand with trends such as Zero Trust and cloud adoption?
The opportunity ahead for the Middle East channel in this space is exceptional. Zero Trust is moving from concept to national mandate, driven by cybersecurity strategies across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the broader GCC. Cloud adoption is accelerating that urgency: every new workload is a new identity that needs to be governed. And the regional ambition around AI is creating a whole new frontier.
A couple of months ago, we announced the expansion of the BeyondTrust Pathfinder Platform into the Gulf region, reflecting our conviction that this market is ready for the next generation of identity security. As organisations here embrace Agentic AI, they are introducing thousands of non-human identities that carry the same risk exposure as any privileged human user, sometimes more. Partners who invest now in developing expertise in securing AI-driven environments will be positioned at the forefront of one of the fastest-growing areas in cybersecurity.
The channel has a genuine opportunity to shape how the Middle East approaches AI security and identity is the foundation of that entire conversation. We are committed to taking our partners on that journey with us.
