Jarir Bookstore, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s (KSA) market leader in office supplies, school supplies, IT products and books, reduced its monthly Internet costs by 43 percent by deploying SonicWALL’s NSA series to manage the company’s growing retail branch network and connectivity requirements.
Jarir, like other progressive business enterprises, has become increasingly ‘distributed’ and employees often work on the move connecting to their business-critical data through laptops, smart-phones and tablets. Secure access and data dissemination has therefore become paramount for IT executives, especially with the proliferation of social media sites that cannibalize bandwidth and invite malicious attacks. A 2009 Forrester report indicates that 50 percent of companies say that 30 percent of their bandwidth is consumed by social media.
“The amount of data being transmitted across company networks has grown exponentially in recent years – and this trend will not be reversed. Thus, it is critical for businesses that network infrastructures keep up with these increased volumes,” said Majid Felemban, IT Manager at Jarir Bookstore.
Jarir’s network connected its branch locations and warehousing facility to the head office through a Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), which was tunneled through an ISP (Internet Service Provider). However, this architecture created multiple points of failure, hampering employee access to business-critical applications.
“With our retail business growing rapidly across Saudi Arabia and the GCC, on average opening three to four showrooms a year, we decided to secure our connectivity and better manage bandwidth requirements by building resilient Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnels to transfer data,” continued Felemban. “We immediately set out to find a solution that avoided the costly route of buying more bandwidth.”
Called in to recommend solutions, NAJTech, SonicWALL’s partner in Saudi Arabia, confirmed and deployed the solution in a record 20 days. “SonicWALL’s NSA Series emerged as the most cost-effective and easy-to-manage solution. Once deployed, it succeeded in lowering Jarir’s TCO (total cost of ownership) by integrating security capabilities with VPN technology,” said Mohammed Samreen, Branch Manager of NAJTech’s Riyadh office.
Furthermore the solution allows real-time visualization that helps IT managers in monitoring web traffic and detecting malicious threats instantaneously.
“It is only a matter of time before enterprises adapt to the evolving needs of their workforce by creating a VPN. User-friendly solutions like SonicWALL allow enterprises to do their own tunneling quickly and efficiently requiring a minimum of technical training, thus allowing them to expand at will. We are proud to support Jarir in its rapid growth phase,” added Shahnawaz Sheikh, regional director for MEA and Turkey at SonicWALL.
Jarir has connected 33 retail branches, the central warehouse and three head offices using SonicWALL and has begun connecting 11 branches of its wholesale division, Jarir Marketing to its network. The next phase is to connect its investment division, Jarir Investment.
