Continuous compliance to ensure strong cybersecurity posture within digital transformation in smart cities

Abstract

The current research addresses concerns about continue security compliance within the digital transformation (DT) in smart cities. There is a critical relationship between digital transformation technologies and security compliance because they share the same scope, but it is a view from different perspectives in business terms. The scope of digital transformation and security compliance is generally focusing on processes, people, and technologies that collaboratively work to provide a valuable business resolution to overcome the issue. Also, those three elements are in a continuous stage of modifications that make them unreliable and unsustainable. Because of the constant changes, the organization must follow an appropriate direction to implement security compliance to mitigate against any cybersecurity risk that causes loss to the organization. Also, the company should aim to explore the security compliance challenges within digital transformation rapidly adoption. Moreover, some countries such as Saudi Arabia initiated National Cybersecurity Authority (NCA) that goals to ensure continuous cybersecurity compliance in Saudi Arabia's critical infrastructure. Following the NCA cybersecurity framework based on NIST. Besides the vision of Saudi Arabia leaders to establish a National Committee for Digital Transformation and develop smart cities program. Furthermore, the kingdom is aware of the cybersecurity compliance challenges faced by the company during its expansion in transforming digital technologies; they offer many supported services such as Saudi CERT, The Bug Bounty Platform, and more. Besides, an important role is being played by security compliance for transforming digital technologies: they are the innovation phase from Digital Transformation and ordering phase from security compliance. The adoption phase from Digital Transformation along with the stabilization phase from the security compliance and the scaling phase from Digital Transformation is linked with sustaining phases from security compliance. Companies are facing the tensions between security compliance and Digital Transformation during prevention or response to attack due to the dynamic nature. To ensure robust cybersecurity posture within digital transformation in smart cities, the organization must apply security management compliance like ISO and perform continuous technical security measurements like doing a penetration test. Besides, a technical security approach like finding a vulnerability and performing penetration tests. This research will focus on security compliance and digital transformation in smart cities, review other related work done in this field, and highlight the importance of having both strategic security and technical security with performing some vulnerability and penetration test. This paper proposes a technical solution that guarantees continuous compliance to ensure strong cybersecurity posture within digital transformation in smart cities, which is a constant update to tailored strategic security and technical security. This paper aims to focus on securing the compliance layer architecture by following this technical solution approach, which is having both the strategic security and the technical security constant update. Comparing to the most common method that organizations follow, which is either they focus on complying with one of the cybersecurity frameworks or performing technical security functions. The achieved results of having both the strategic security like SAMA cybersecurity framework and the technical security such as penetration test, prevent the organization from having tackle vulnerabilities that could lead to advanced persistent threat (APT) or attack.