English abstract
Cyber Security Strategy (CSS) is a high-level organization plan of protecting its assets through
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to accomplish business objectives
efficiently. A CSS provides a collection of frameworks, procedures, and corresponding
objectives that aim to achieve certain quality in securing the organization's infrastructure. Since
today's organizations are highly dependent on ICTs, implementing, and maintaining CSS is
crucial. From the literature review, it is evident that such factors are abstractly stated. Also, no
holistic study exists that lists or evaluates the critical factors in the public sector. The objective of
our work is to explore and identify the critical factors influencing the implementation of CSS in
public sector organizations in Oman. This research is the first study to explore the critical factors
needed to implement CSS in the public sector in Oman, provide a distinct and well-structured
list of factors that will help the public sector's organizations of Oman to implement CSS
successfully. It will also serve as an important source of reference for future researchers in
general for the private and public sectors. The study also confirms how the nature of public
organizations differs for the private ones when it comes to economics factor. It shows how those
factors are a necessity for any organization as well. This research also generates a list of factors
that can be a basis in evaluating a framework for assessing the effectiveness of a given CSS. To
achieve the sought aims, we adopted a qualitative research methodology by conducting semistructured interviews with 10 participants having extensive experience in security settings to
confirm the critical factors.
