Manama, Bahrain – 6 October 2021 – The Central Bank of Bahrain (“CBB”) hosted the 5th Workshop for Information Security Specialists in the GCC Central Banks. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together Information Security Specialists in the GCC Central Banks, to be informed and educated on the current Strategic Information Security trends to be able to enable Central Banks to face threats head-on in order to develop a new, innovative, dynamic and secure financial landscape.

Mr. Yousef Al Fadhel, Executive Director Corporate Services at CBB, welcomed the participants and commented: “I would urge the participants to continue to engage, to share information and to learn from one another’s experience so that we can collectively move to a more secure and robust financial landscape ready to respond to any emerging threats.

The workshop covered two strategic technology trends in 2021, namely Privacy Enhancing Computation (PEC) and Cybersecurity Mesh. PEC implements protection of data in use. It supports use cases where data must remain confidential during processing and analytics, and where the algorithms must remain confidential even if the data itself does not. The Cybersecurity mesh architecture allows organizations to address IT assets that are increasingly outside traditional enterprise perimeters by using a composable and scalable approach to extend security controls to distributed assets by decoupling policy enforcement from the assets being protected. The two technologies were covered by well-known experts of international acclaim.