Share with your CISO
Dell Technologies’ Modern Enterprise Readiness Study 2026 puts hard numbers on what UAE security leaders already sense: 68% of organizations say security and compliance concerns have actively slowed AI deployments, 90% expect security baked into every vendor proposal by default, and 94% treat integrated cyber recovery as a mandatory infrastructure criterion. The survey covers 1,500 EMEA decision-makers across financial services, healthcare, and the public sector, and sits inside a 2,950-respondent global dataset released in mid-2026.
What this means for your business
The 68% figure is the one worth sitting with. Security friction delaying AI rollouts isn’t a compliance team being difficult; it’s the AI program itself carrying a hidden veto. If your organization is in the majority that hasn’t fully prepared infrastructure for AI at production scale, the drag isn’t coming from the models or the use cases. It’s coming from governance gaps, data residency questions, and regulatory exposure under frameworks like the UAE’s Critical Information Infrastructure Protection policy and the Personal Data Protection Law. Where you sit on that 68% determines whether this is confirmation or a deadline.
The consolidation signal deserves scrutiny. Eighty-six percent preferring a single strategic technology partner sounds like a procurement preference, but it carries a real security implication: vendor concentration reduces attack surface management complexity while simultaneously creating a single point of failure for your entire AI and infrastructure stack. Dell, as the study’s sponsor, has an obvious interest in validating the “fewer, deeper partners” thesis, which likely flatters the consolidation numbers without surfacing the concentration risk that a CISO would need to price in before committing. The preference is real; the framing is selective.
The leading indicator here is managed security services: 78% of UAE organizations expect their use to grow over the next two to three years. That’s not a budget line item, it’s a signal that internal teams already know they can’t staff the AI security gap themselves. Any CISO defending a flat headcount budget while AI workloads scale should treat that 78% as the benchmark their board will eventually cite. The renewal decision this reframes isn’t your SIEM contract; it’s whether your current managed services scope was written before generative AI entered your environment, because if it was, the coverage model is probably already obsolete.
Based on reporting from AI, security and technology sovereignty reshape enterprise priorities across the UAE, originally published 2026-10-15 08:13:00.
