Middle East Industry
Saudi industrial control systems get a locally built security platform under a new deal
By Staff Writer | 5 September 2026
CQR has signed a master services agreement with sirar by stc covering operational technology, connected devices and industrial connected devices across the Kingdom, built around a monitoring platform designed and developed in Saudi Arabia.
CQR, which trades as Absolute Solution for Cybersecurity Co and describes itself as the first Saudi company working solely on operational technology cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection, has signed a master services agreement with sirar by stc. The agreement was reported on 3 September 2026 and last updated on 4 September. It sets a framework for delivering specialist security services to operational technology, connected device and industrial connected device environments across the Kingdom.
The stated shape of the arrangement is that CQR's own technology is combined with the managed security operation of the other party, to give owners of industrial plant a single route to protecting assets that were, for most of their working lives, never expected to be connected to anything.
The distinction that matters on a plant
Operational technology is the equipment that makes a process happen: the controllers, the instruments, the safety systems and the control desks. It is not information technology, and the difference is not a matter of vocabulary. An office network can be taken down for an hour to apply a patch. A pump station, a substation or a production line usually cannot, and a control action taken in error can injure somebody.
That is why the interesting sentence in the announcement is not about detection. It is the statement that decisions capable of affecting production remain subject to expert human oversight. Automation that can stop a process on its own reading of a signal is a different risk from automation that raises a flag.
The platform at the centre of the agreement is called FENNEC. It is described as designed and developed in Saudi Arabia for industrial and operational environments, and as providing a current view of critical assets, monitoring that understands the process it is watching, continuous compliance and changing risk intelligence.
Cyber sovereignty begins with owning the technology, knowledge, and capabilities required to protect our most critical environments. With this in mind, we designed and developed FENNEC in Saudi Arabia to meet the specialized requirements of industrial and operational environments.
Naser Al-Dossary, Chief Executive of CQR
How the asset list is built
Mr Al-Dossary said the platform uses artificial intelligence to help specialist analysts interpret alerts, rank risks, direct investigations and judge the possible effect on operations, while decisions that could affect production stay with people rather than with the system.
He also said the platform lets an operator classify assets by how critical they are, what they do in the process, and what their loss would mean for safety, production and continuity, so that alerts can be ranked by their real operational effect rather than by their technical severity. On a plant with several thousand connected items, that ordering is the difference between an alert list a team can work and one it cannot.
What has not been published
No contract value, term or renewal arrangement has been released, and neither party has said how many sites, sectors or asset owners the framework is expected to cover. Nor has any customer been named, and no independent assessment or certification of the platform has been cited in the announcement. Everything above the level of the two parties' own description of their product remains unpublished, and for a plant operator weighing the offer that is where the questions start.