Enhancing Ransomware Resilience in Saudi Industrial Organizations Through Integrated It/Ot Cybersecurity and Incident Response
Abstract
-Ransomware has evolved from being merely an IT problem into a cyber-physical resilience issue for industrial companies. In Saudi Arabia, industrial digitisation, cloud adoption, remote engineering and IT/OT convergence can improve efficiency while also expanding pathways through which cyber incidents may affect production, safety, quality and continuity (National Cybersecurity Authority, 2022; Kayan et al., 2022; Benmalek, 2024). This review examines how Saudi industrial organisations can improve ransomware resilience by integrating IT and OT cybersecurity with incident response. It uses a structured integrative review of 19 peer-reviewed, standards and government sources published mainly from 2020 to September 2026, with older or foundational guidance retained where necessary. The synthesis highlights five interdependent resilience themes: governance and risk ownership; asset visibility and architecture; identity, segmentation and secure access; detection and coordinated response; and trusted recovery of operational capability. The evidence indicates that enterprise ransomware controls need OT-specific adaptation because industrial environments place distinctive emphasis on availability, safety, legacy assets and process dependencies (Stouffer et al., 2023; Al-Hawawreh et al., 2024; Saini et al., 2026). Resilience therefore requires shared IT/OT decision structures, engineering-aware containment, protected and tested backups, dependency-aware recovery sequencing, supplier coordination and exercises that test degraded operations rather than data restoration alone (CISA, 2023a; Maysey et al., 2026). Saudi NCA controls provide a governance baseline within their applicable scope, while plant-level playbooks and explicit recovery acceptance criteria translate that baseline into operational capability (National Cybersecurity Authority, 2019, 2022, 2024). The paper proposes an integrated plant-centred resilience model linking preparation, detection, containment