Decree 26-07: Algeria’s Cybersecurity Units Mandate — What Enterprises Must Do Now

What Decree 26-07 Actually Mandates

Algeria’s cybersecurity regulatory architecture has been evolving rapidly. Presidential Decree 20-05, issued in 2020, created the foundational national information systems security framework. December 2025 brought Presidential Decree 25-321, which approved Algeria’s National Cybersecurity Strategy for 2025–2029, and November 2025 brought Decree 25-298, which amended Decree 20-05 to strengthen governance requirements.

Decree 26-07, issued in January 2026, goes further: it establishes dedicated cybersecurity units inside public institutions, specifying both their missions and organizational structures. This is not a policy aspiration — it is an operational mandate backed by the institutional authority of two bodies:

• ANSSI (Agence Nationale de Sécurité des Systèmes d’Information): the national coordinator for implementing Algeria’s cybersecurity strategy, responsible for translating policy into operational requirements across state entities.
• DZ-CERT (Algerian Computer Emergency Response Team), hosted at CERIST: the national operational center for cybersecurity incident response, threat analysis, and international coordination.

Critically, Algeria’s Law 18-04 of 2018 defines cybersecurity as “the set of tools, policies, security concepts, security mechanisms” protecting data availability, integrity, and confidentiality — and electronic communications providers already carry technical safeguards obligations under that law. Decree 26-07 creates the institutional machinery to enforce those obligations within the state and to set the benchmark private-sector companies will increasingly be measured against.

Why the Private Sector Cannot Treat This as a Public-Sector Problem

Several dynamics push Decree 26-07’s compliance logic into the private sector, even though the decree itself targets public institutions.

Supplier and contractor exposure. Companies that provide IT services, managed cloud, networking, or software development to public institutions will be required to meet the security standards of their public-sector clients. Algeria’s Digital Policy Alert tracker documents that the pace of Algeria’s digital regulation has accelerated sharply since late 2025, with three major cybersecurity instruments issued in as many months. When a ministry’s cybersecurity unit conducts a vendor review, that review will be guided by the decree’s organizational requirements — meaning private-sector suppliers need to map their own controls to those requirements.

The CISO appointment signal. Algeria has required state information systems to appoint a Chief Information Security Officer since Decree 20-05. As confirmed by cybersecurity intelligence tracking Algeria’s regulatory posture, Decree 26-07 extends this logic to unit-level governance inside public bodies. Private enterprises operating in regulated sectors — banking, energy, telecoms — face the same directional pressure from their sectoral regulators.

The 2025–2029 strategy creates audit expectations. The National Cybersecurity Strategy approved by Decree 25-321 explicitly focuses on protecting state digital infrastructures. As implementation progresses, private entities that interface with state systems will face heightened due-diligence scrutiny, particularly around incident reporting readiness and access control architecture.

What Algerian Enterprise Compliance Officers Should Do About It

1. Map Your Institutional Touchpoints Against the Decree’s Scope

The first step is not to build a cybersecurity unit — it is to understand whether and how your organization connects to public institutions covered by the decree. Conduct a rapid inventory of public-sector contracts, shared infrastructure, data-exchange agreements, and joint programs. For each touchpoint, document what security controls you currently provide, who is accountable for them, and whether they would survive a review by a newly-formed public-institution cybersecurity unit. This mapping exercise typically takes two to four weeks and is the foundation for every subsequent action.

2. Align Your Internal Security Function to ANSSI’s Organizational Model

The decree does not prescribe a single structure, but it does require defined missions and organizational clarity. Private enterprises should benchmark their existing security functions — whether that is a standalone CISO, an IT security team, or an outsourced SOC — against the model ANSSI will use to assess public-institution compliance. At minimum, this means documenting: who is accountable for security decisions, what is the incident reporting chain, how are third-party risks governed, and what is the escalation path for critical incidents. Where gaps exist, the next twelve months represent the window to close them before audit expectations crystallize.

3. Establish a DZ-CERT Reporting Relationship Before an Incident Forces One

DZ-CERT is Algeria’s operational incident response hub. Organizations that wait until a breach to establish a relationship with DZ-CERT lose two advantages: the intelligence-sharing access that comes from proactive engagement, and the credibility that comes from demonstrating preparedness. Enterprises should identify and document the DZ-CERT contact pathway, subscribe to available threat-feed notifications, and test their internal incident escalation procedures against a tabletop scenario that ends with a DZ-CERT notification. This is not a bureaucratic step — it is the operational equivalent of knowing where the fire exit is before the alarm sounds.

4. Upgrade Vendor Risk Governance to Match the New Baseline

Decree 26-07 creates a public-institution security baseline that will cascade through procurement. Algerian enterprises that want to retain or win public-sector contracts should proactively audit the security provisions in their existing supplier contracts. Specifically: do your key technology suppliers have documented incident response plans, are their access controls auditable, and do they carry security certifications that will satisfy a public-institution cybersecurity unit’s vendor review? Gaps here are not theoretical — they are future contract-termination clauses waiting to materialize.

The Structural Lesson

Decree 26-07 is not an isolated regulatory event — it is the operational arm of a three-decree package (Decrees 25-298, 25-321, and 26-07) issued between November 2025 and January 2026. Algeria is constructing an institutional cybersecurity architecture at speed. The public sector will build the units; the private sector will be benchmarked against them.

The enterprises that treat this as a public-sector-only problem will find themselves on the wrong side of procurement criteria within 12 to 18 months. Those that use the decree as an impetus to formalize their own security governance — CISO accountability, DZ-CERT relationship, vendor controls — will have a compliance posture that serves them well beyond this specific regulation.

The pattern is not unique to Algeria. Morocco’s DGSSI, Tunisia’s ANSSi, and South Africa’s CSIRT frameworks all created private-sector compliance pressure through the same mechanism: mandate the public sector, then use procurement and contract law to pull private actors into alignment. Algeria is following that trajectory deliberately, and the pace of its recent legislative output — three major instruments in three months — signals that the political will behind the 2025–2029 strategy is real and funded.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Further Reading

• Algeria Strengthens Cybersecurity Framework to Protect National Infrastructure — Tech Africa News
• CMS Expert Guide to Data Protection and Cyber Security Laws: Algeria — CMS Law
• Cybersecurity Intelligence: Algeria — Cybersecurity Intelligence
• Digital Policy Alert: Algeria Digest — Digital Policy Alert