Minister of Water and Irrigation Eng. Raed Abu Al-Saud, during the signing of an agreement to upgrade the water sector to meet cybersecurity requirements with a specialized local company on Thursday, September 11, 2025, in the presence of the Secretary General of the Water Authority Eng. Sufyan Al-Batayneh, the Secretary General of the Ministry of Water and Irrigation Dr. Jihad Al-Mahamid, the Secretary General of the Jordan Valley Authority Eng. Hisham Al-Hayasa, and a number of water sector officials, stated:
اضافة اعلان
The water sector is working to achieve water security in line with the Economic Modernization Vision and the Water Sector Strategic Plan 2023–2040, while ensuring the development and security of electronic services according to the latest global specifications and standards. He pointed out that this agreement is one of the most important in the region, aimed at studying, analyzing, managing, and addressing cybersecurity risks at both the information technology and operational technology levels, which are key features of the water sector.
Minister Abu Al-Saud added that this achievement seeks to ensure information security amid rising cybersecurity threats, while enhancing resilience, protecting data, ensuring business continuity, and optimizing the use of material, human, and technological resources in the sector. He emphasized that addressing this challenge solely from a technological perspective would inevitably weaken the sector’s resilience. Therefore, the water sector has launched a series of initiatives to improve governance, adopt future technologies across various fields, ensure effective and sustainable use in agricultural, industrial, and domestic sectors, and provide secure data to decision-makers at advanced levels. This stems from the sector’s recognition of the importance of cybersecurity in achieving the strategic goals of digital transformation in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in general, and in the water sector in particular, as one of its vital components.
He also praised the strategic role of the National Cybersecurity Center through its launch of the National Cybersecurity Framework and numerous strategic, technical, academic, and awareness initiatives that aim to enhance the resilience of all sectors, protect data and information, and preserve them as national assets that must be safeguarded. He noted that under this agreement, the Ministry of Water and Irrigation will collaborate with the academic sector to train groups of Jordanian university students to build national capacities, transfer and localize knowledge in the Kingdom, ensure the sustainability of advanced best practices in cybersecurity risk management within the water sector, and establish a regional center of excellence in this field. The ministry also aims to later export this expertise to similar sectors in the region, contributing to driving the national economy forward.
For his part, Secretary General of the Water Authority Eng. Sufyan Al-Batayneh explained that the agreement represents a first, yet essential, step toward building an integrated cybersecurity system within the sector. It will enable all organizational units in the Ministry, the Water Authority, the Jordan Valley Authority, and water companies to identify and analyze cybersecurity risks in a quantitative, strategic, and continuous manner. This will provide decision-makers in the sector with analytical data and insights on financial and operational risks, help prioritize risk mitigation, and launch the necessary projects and measures to address or minimize their impact. It will also maximize the return on investment from such projects while avoiding the waste of human, financial, and technical resources on low-priority or less critical risks. He added that this step will be followed by further measures aimed at achieving higher levels of cybersecurity and building cyber capacities in line with the requirements of the National Cybersecurity Framework.
Meanwhile, Mr. Mohammad Abdul Rahim, Director General of Octopian Security Company, praised the pioneering step launched by the Ministry of Water and Irrigation, describing it as the first of its kind in the region to study, analyze, and address cybersecurity risks at the information technology and operational technology levels, which are distinctive features of the water sector.
