SECURE AND RESILIENT CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE FOR SAUDI ARABIA: INTEGRATING SIEM, AUTOMATED MONITORING, AND INFRASTRUCTURE ANALYTICS

Abstract

Saudi organizations are expanding their dependence on cloud and virtualized infrastructure for digital government, healthcare, finance, enterprise applications, and data-intensive services. This shift increases agility but also enlarges the operational and cyber-risk surface because failures, misconfigurations, compromised identities, anomalous workloads, and attacks can propagate across distributed environments. This review examines how Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), automated monitoring, artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), and infrastructure analytics can be integrated into a single resilience-oriented operating model for Saudi cloud environments. A structured narrative review of peer-reviewed literature and authoritative cybersecurity and cloud-governance sources was conducted, emphasizing evidence published from 2020 onward while retaining selected foundational monitoring studies. The synthesis identifies five recurring requirements: comprehensive telemetry, centralized correlation, adaptive anomaly detection, automated but governed response, and measurable recovery. The review argues that security and availability should not be managed as separate disciplines; instead, organizations should build a shared observability plane that links cybersecurity operations, infrastructure performance, incident response, and disaster recovery. For Saudi Arabia, this approach supports alignment with NCA cybersecurity controls, DGA cloud and digital-transformation standards, CST cloud regulation, and sector-specific obligations while contributing to secure digital transformation under Vision 2030.