Saudi Arabia’s Cloud Computing Regulatory Environment Highlighted by CITC in New Study

The Saudi Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) has published a new in-depth study comparing the legislative, regulatory, and cybersecurity environment of Saudi Arabia’s cloud computing sector with ten other countries. The study benchmarks the emerging Saudi cloud computing industry against the US, EU, UK, Japan, Australia, and other countries by comparing policy decisions, data sovereignty, and protection. Saudi Arabia was notably one of the first of the surveyed countries to adopt specific regulations for cloud service providers under the CITC’s Cloud Computing Regulatory Framework, which delineates responsibility between the customer and service providers. In addition, the Saudi government has standardized practices of classifying and safeguarding data and implemented a policy to encourage government entities to replace traditional IT solutions with cloud-based services. The CITC published the study to highlight the Saudi government’s latest steps toward a digital transformation of its economy under its Vision 2030 goals.