Exploratory study on innovative use of ISO standards for IT security in the UAE

Abstract

With the high percentage of security breaches, following IT standards could be one way to protecting sensitive information and auditing the accuracy, confidentiality, and integrity of information within the organization. ISO security standards enable organizations to practice safe security techniques to minimize the number of successful IT security attacks. Many researches have been established extensively in both the research and industry fields that highlighted the need for implementing an information security standards and policy in strive towards the securing of information. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no such study on using ISO standards in the IT field, in the UAE. This paper focuses more specifically on the IT security techniques. Emirates Authority for Standardization and Metrology (ESMA) seeks to focus its efforts on the IT field - IT Security techniques being an area of interest. Since the UAE is always coping with the rapid growth in technology and it has a lack of publications on the topic of IT standards, it is worthy to address the usage of ISO standards in this region. This research survey, which sent to many public and private Emirati organizations, shows that the usage of ISO standards in this region of the world is quite promising.