All together now

When Saudi Arabia’s Al Rajhi Group signed off its ambitious growth plan, it realised it also needed to drastically overhaul its existing IT infrastructure. Enter Sonicwall and its Saudi Arabian partner Networker Strategy.

With interests ranging from real estate to financial services, and offices across Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the Al Rajhi Holding Group operates a huge IT infrastructure; one that spreads across the entire width of the Arabian Peninsula.

The company is headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and has branch offices in Jeddah, Jubail, Dammam, and Yanbu in Saudi Arabia, and Ras Al Khamiah and Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. With a development plan that calls for rapid development of its business, the company faced a number of issues with its IT infrastructure including the speed of data transfer, as well as issues with application deployment.

“With multiple branch operations and a very rapidly growing business agenda both in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, we were looking for cost-effective solutions to manage our network traffic and wide area network connectivity,” explains Suhail Akhtar, senior systems engineer at Al Rajhi Group. “We needed a solution capable of providing full network protection and secure access from remote areas and branch offices across the Al Rajhi Group.”

Among the issues faced by Al Rajhi’s engineers was security threats posed by unregulated internet access, vulnerabilities created by the use of peer-to-peer applications, instant messaging, and the sharing of multimedia content and applications over the company network. While the company hadn’t suffered an attack from malicious software, the company’s IT management was well aware of the risks posed by allowing these practices to carry on unabated.

Due to the nature of the company’s existing network, its engineers were quick to recognise that it would need to overhaul how it saw and operated its network. “Being a diversified group, we wanted to build an integrated network, centralising the datacentre in our head office in Riyadh and connecting seamlessly to network users in different areas,” reveals Akhtar.

As part of the network overhaul, the company set about looking at the risk points and solutions that could help plug them. According to Afran Khan, a branch manager at Networker Strategy – the integrator that handled the rollout – the company chose Sonicwall’s range of solutions. “The solution offered consolidation of security appliances on corporate networks to include functions such as deep packet inspection firewall, application intelligence, control and visualisation, and virtual private network.

“Instead of one appliance per application, security consolidation aggregates multiple interconnected security applications on a single piece of hardware without compromising security and performance,” he adds.

The new range of hardware has had a huge impact on the company’s ability to manage its IT infrastructure and mitigate security risks. According to Dr Marwan Al Siddiqi, group ICT director at Al Rajhi Holding Group, the company has been able to gain complete control of all data transfers on its network through a combination of policy and compliance. It has meant the company has been able to track access to how much time is spent on external websites and social media website without impacting moral.

“The benefits we achieved through deploying Sonicwall’s solution had a big impact on our operations and our bandwidth usage has been improved by 75%,” comments Dr Al Siddiqi. “This has also reduced our IT costs by 30%, lowering the cost of hardware and internalised functions that we used to outsource, as our in-house staff has been trained to use Sonicwall technologies.

“Finally, we saved immensely on time due to the centralisation of controls by utilising the solutions powerful management.”