Cybersecurity threats to businesses in the UAE have surged at an astonishing rate due to Third-party software integration. Here’s how to overcome.
DUBAI, UAE - June 05, 2025: More than 50% of businesses based in the UAE use third-party software solutions for business process automation. With the advent of technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Cloud Computing, digital transformation is at its peak.
Especially since the time of the pandemic, the demand for software solutions to automate manual business tasks has increased at an astonishing rate. Faster task completion, increased accuracy, and 10x business efficiency resulting from business process automation are encouraging a continuous surge in software implementation.
However, third-party software solutions are an open treasure for cybercriminals looking to find sensitive business data. Data such as bank account details, passwords, customer information, and client information is highly sensitive. When using third-party software, businesses share such personal and sensitive data not only with the software service providing business, but to more other parties as well.
Using third-party software solutions to automate business processes like sales, marketing, accounting, HRM, etc., makes you share your sensitive business data with different entities, including-
However, sharing data with the software service provider and government bodies is fair enough, but the inclusion of other middlemen might be a risky approach.
When data is disclosed to multiple bodies, protection becomes hard. No matter how secure and strongly encrypted the automation software is, if even a single middleman has weak encryption, losing precious business data becomes obvious.
In 2024, a renowned cybersecurity company, Kaspersky, held a survey and found that around 41% of businesses based in the Middle East face data leaks due to third-party software vulnerabilities.
The same survey also revealed that over 60% of UAE-based enterprises use more than 10 third-party software solutions, but shockingly, only 27% of them audit these vendors on a regular basis.
Not all permitted APIs and sub-processors are end-to-end encrypted. Eventually, a cybercriminal can use social engineering, SQL injection, and other forms of cyberattacks and gain users’ login credentials, bank account details, and passwords.
Not always the business, but even the customers and clients of these businesses might suffer such data leaks and fall prey to cyber threats.
However, the UAE’s government has strict internet content regulation and data sharing policies, but it does not save a UAE-based business from sharing sensitive business data with third parties when using a third-party business process automation tool.
Sharing data between multiple parties is a necessity in the case of third-party tools. At any cost, a business needs to accept its terms and conditions to use all the functions of the software solution.
The UAE mainly depends on the US and Germany for third-party digital solutions. The content regulation and data sharing policies in these countries are highly different from those of the UAE. Eventually, ready-to-use software solutions enable the UAE-based businesses to agree with certain Western terms, and the chances of data leaks increase.
A recent study has found that 51% of the UAE-based businesses have switched to a better alternative called custom software development. A customised software solution is exclusive to a business and enables a business to get complete control over the data sharing policies.
When choosing custom software development services, a business has the option to buy 100% ownership of the source code, and the software development company has no right to the software post-development. This way, a custom-built software product eliminates the vendor from the data sharing chain.
Similarly, choosing sub-processors, payment gateways, and APIs also depends upon the choice of the software owner, giving more control over data sharing to the software owner.
According to Ezulix, a renowned custom software development business, utilising exclusive software solutions for business process automation can reduce the security threats by 60-70%. A business can control who it wants to share its data with and eliminate vulnerabilities to a great extent.
The business advises, ‘Custom software development is a one-time investment and businesses looking for higher cybersecurity, more customised user experience, and reduction in the operational cost must give custom solutions a try.’