Saudi Arabia Arms Public Sector With Google Cloud Services

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia plans to offer Google's Chronicle CyberShield as a managed service, to better secure the nation's public sector organizations.

The plan is part of a deal signed between Google and Haboob — a cybersecurity service provider owned by the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming, and Drones — which also includes an AI-powered managed security monitoring service, and incident response, compromise and cyber defense assessments, and red-teaming capabilities from Mandiant.

Developed specifically for government agencies to integrate threat intelligence, detection, and response, Chronicle CyberShield enables multiple government entities to proactively and rapidly share threat information, accelerate investigations, and initiate a united response, according to Google.

Haboob will also oversee the launch of a government security operations center (SOC) in Saudi Arabia.

This is yet another big move by the Saudis to work with US cybersecurity vendors. Saudi energy company Aramco earlier this week announced plans to boost security for Saudi operational technology (OT) environments in a deal with Dragos.