Middle East cybersecurity spending is heading for $46bn

The Middle East cybersecurity market was valued at $20.55bn in 2025 and is estimated to grow from $23.54bn in 2026 to $46.39bn by 2031, a compound annual rate of 14.55%. The UAE is the fastest-growing market in the region, projected at 17.46% a year over the same period. The drivers are more specific than general digitisation, and they say something about what kind of security market this is. Rapid sovereign-cloud rollouts across the GCC are a named driver of spending. That is a direct consequence of the data residency regimes now in force — Saudi Arabia's fully enforced PDPL with SAR 5m penalties, the UAE's compliance deadline of 1 January 2027, Egypt's regime becoming enforceable in October 2026. Moving regulated workloads into locally hosted environments does not reduce security requirements. It relocates them, generally into architectures the organisation has not run before, with new identity boundaries, new logging requirements and new failure modes. Every migration produces security spending. Operational technology is the distinctive part. Mounting OT threats to regional oil and gas assets are the second named driver, and this is where the Middle East diverges from most markets. OT security protects industrial control systems — the equipment running refineries, pipelines, power generation and water treatment. It is a different discipline from IT security, with different vendors, different protocols and consequences that are physical rather than informational. A compromised database leaks data; a compromised control system damages plant. The Gulf has an unusually high concentration of exactly these assets, and they are strategically significant national infrastructure. That combination makes OT security a larger share of regional spending than it is almost anywhere else. Mega-projects add a third driver. Expo 2030 and NEOM are cited as reasons for critical national infrastructure hardening. Large projects with fixed public deadlines concentrate security investment because the exposure is concentrated: a single site or event with national visibility and an immovable date. Commercially, a market growing at 14.55% with those drivers rewards a particular kind of vendor — one that understands industrial protocols, can operate inside sovereign cloud boundaries, and can satisfy a regulator rather than only a CISO. That is a narrower field than the general security market, and it favours specialists and regional integrators over volume products. It also explains why so many cybersecurity partnerships announced in the region pair an international vendor with a local distributor: the international firm has the technology and the local firm has the clearances, the relationships and the compliance knowledge.