Saudi Arabia: One of Saudi Arabia's leading technology infrastructure firms has joined with IBM to allow its customers to run global workloads without highly-sensitive data leaving the Kingdom.

The Edarat Group has selected the IBM Cloud Satellite system to enable clients to access secure services in any environment where their data resides – allowing them to abide by local regulation.

However, the data itself will stay in Saudi Arabia. This is a key for regulated industries like financial services, telco, and healthcare, and can allow companies in these industries to run workloads in local and global data centres.

Last month, IBM released an analysis claiming the Middle East region has the second highest average breach cost amongst the 17 regions surveyed for the study.

These data breaches cost companies $6.93 million per breach on average, according to IBM.

Edarat's selection of the Cloud Satellite system comes a week after IBM joined with companies including Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft to partner with the Saudi Arabian government in a $1.2bn tech initiative programme aimed at helping youngsters develop digital skills such as cybersecurity, programming, AI and gaming.