Al Rajhi Holding, a diversified business conglomerate with operations spread in Saudi Arabia and UAE, secured and integrated its wide area network (WAN), using SonicWALL’s Network Security Appliance (NSA) series.
The Group, with distributed server assets across various locations: Jeddah, Jubail, Dammam and Yanbu in Saudi Arabia; and Dubai, Ras Al Khaimah and Sharjah in the UAE, sought to gain enhanced returns on its technology investments by better controlling the cumbersome and expensive maintenance and upkeep of hard-ware and network infrastructure.
As malware and phishing attacks were growing in strength and frequency globally, controlling peer-to-peer applications, Instant Messaging (IM) and the sharing of multi-media content and applications became critical. With ever-growing Internet security threats and increased vulnerabilities due to employee remote access and branch con-nectivity issues, Al Rajhi’s technology team decided to take decisive action. The group sought an integrated solution to manage and secure traffic across their WAN. They consulted their IT solutions provider Networker Strategy, who suggested SonicWALL’s Network Security appliance series.
With SonicWALL, the Group was able to improve bandwidth by 75%, reduce IT costs by 30%, streamline administration with centralized management, lower hardware costs through consolidation and, by training in-house staff on SonicWALL technology, internalize functions they used to outsource.
“The benefits achieved through deploying SonicWALL had a significant impact on our operations. Al Rajhi now has an integrated network with a centralized data centre in our head office in Riyadh and seamless connectivity to network users in different areas.” explained Dr. Marwan Al Siddiqi, group ICT director, Al Rajhi Holding Group.
The solutions deployed combine multi-core hardware with Reassembly-free Deep Packet Inspection™ (RFDPI) for uncompromising protection and performance. Branch offices, central sites and distributed mid-enterprise networks benefited from the reliability and cost-effectiveness of the NSA series’ advanced routing, high-availability and high-speed IPSec and SSL VPN technology.
““Instead of one appliance per application, security consolidation aggregates multiple interconnected security applications on a single piece of hardware without compromis-ing security and performance,” said Afran Khan, branch manager, Networker Strategy.
Al Rajhi had deployed a SSL-VPN 2000 secure remote access solution and have already upgraded to the more powerful SonicWALL Aventail E-Class SRA EX-6000. The Group is to further update its network security to the high-performance low-latency SuperMassive Next-Generation Firewall. Plans are also underway to adopt the SonicWALL Global Management System (GMS®), which allows users to manage and monitor the activity of all its SonicWALL devices from one central console.
“Our partner in Saudi Arabia, Networker Strategy, worked with the Al Rajhi’s team in Saudi Arabia to roll out SonicWALL’s NSA 240, 2400, NSA 3500 and NSA 4500 firewalls over the course of a year. We are pleased with this initiative and hope to continue dep-loying new and improved solutions to strengthen Al Rajhi’s network,” said Shahnawaz Sheikh, Regional Director, Middle East, Africa and Turkey, SonicWALL.
