Customer Profile

Dubai Investments Selects Blue Coat’s ADN Infrastructure

for WAN Optimization, Web Security and Policy Control
Blue Coat ProxySG Appliances, WebFilter and ProxyClient(TM) Optimize Application
Delivery, Enable Direct-to-the-Net Services and Contain WAN Bandwidth Costs

Organization Background
Dubai Investments Dubai Investments is the largest investment company publicly traded on the Dubai stock
UAE market. The group consists of 46 subsidiary companies most of which are located in
the United Arab Emirates and the rest across the GCC. With a vast number of around
www.dubaiinvestments.com 2000 PC users, a key objective was to create an effective shared services centre. In the
year 2007, a scalable, secure and high performance data centre was set up with the
Industry intention of subsequently connecting all the subsidiaries. For those remote sites which
Financial could not be connected via the Internet (IP or VPN) on account of huge data traffic, it was
decided to connect through an MPLS network. At the start, 3 major office locations were
Challenge connected to MPLS – the Dubai Investments head office, the Festival Tower office and
the Marmum Dairy Farm, off Al Ain road.
Accelerate key business
applications at 3 major office
The Challenge
locations, while reducing
bandwidth usage and provide Web With MPLS connectivity, application performance took a major hit. The IT team was faced
and WAN security and control with 2 options – either increase the WAN link bandwidth or optimize data traffic through
WAN Optimization.
Solution
Internal Evaluation Process
> Blue Coat ProxySG Appliances,
WebFilter and ProxyClient The IT team at Dubai Investments evaluates all major infrastructure projects based on
a guiding principle called ReCAPS: Re-Reliability of the solution based on parameters
optimize Application Delivery and
like fault tolerance levels, disaster recovery etc; C- Capacity requirement and speed
Performance
of scaling up; A- Accounting by an IT Governance Committee which looks at the cost-
• Data and Network is secure benefit and total cost of ownership (TCO); P-Performance and S-Security of the solution.
• Onlinetransaction time After a thorough study through ReCAPS, it was decided to go in for WAN Optimization.
has reduced One of the key deciding factors was the benefit of having more security control. Security
• Increased productivity was a major concern, as previously Windows and anti-virus updates, backups and group
• Enhanced
policies were managed locally by each subsidiary, which made control difficult. WAN
the introduction of
Optimization made it possible to schedule all these tasks centrally.
new business applications

Vendor Selection – The Blue Coat Advantage

Inline with Dubai Investments’ policy, there were more than 3 vendors including Cisco,
Juniper and Riverbed that were evaluated for their ADN infrastructure solutions. The
first criteria included product related aspects like compression, optimisation algorithm,
caching engine, security etc, and whether the vendors’ technical capabilities matched
the client requirements. The second was a corporate assessment in terms of customer
references, financial stability etc and the third was cost. Mr. Manoharan K, IT Advisor of
Dubai Investments says, “Blue Coat was a clear winner on all three fronts, especially
pricing which was way better than the other vendors”. Dubai Investments carried out
Proof of Concept (POC) with a few of the vendor solutions. Mr. Manoharan explains that
the level and quality of support extended by Blue Coat was another factor that tipped
the scales in the company’s favour. “From the time of initiating discussions, Blue Coat’s
response time was very quick, the information supplied was comprehensive and the
interaction was very pleasant. Blue Coat was one step ahead of competition”.
 Customer Profile

Before the WAN Optimization project, Dubai Investments had already installed Blue
Coat WebFilter in its data centre, by which the company was able to control and secure
“As compared to other ADN
Web traffic. “It is the best solution available and we are very happy. Be it HTTPS or B2B
infrastructure vendors, Blue traffic, media streaming or VOIP, we have complete and granular control and the reports
Coat was a clear winner on all generated are excellent”, says Mr. Manoharan. The WAN Optimization solution offered by
3 criteria – product technical Blue Coat was easily integrated with the existing WebFilter solution at a marginal cost,
capabilities, corporate profile enabling diversion of traffic with a high degree of security.

and cost. We are very happy with The WAN Optimization project was completed by Blue Coat in 1 month. After project
completion, Blue Coat imparted training to the IT Networking Staff at Dubai Investments,
the outcome of the Blue Coat
resulting in a very satisfactory knowledge transfer. Mr. Manoharan is confident that the
implementation and look forward
IT team is capable of configuring appliances themselves should the need arise of adding
to our next project with them additional links.
involving PacketShaper.”
A Reason to Smile
- Mr. Manoharan K
IT Advisor of Dubai Investments Although ROI cannot be calculated in an objective manner on a cost-revenue model, as
is typical with most IT infrastructure projects, Mr. Manoharan explains that there are
plenty of intangible benefits that have arisen from the Blue Coat implementation. The
data and network is highly safe and secure resulting in peace of mind for the IT staff.
The application performance has improved drastically. Time taken to complete online
transactions have shortened resulting in increased productivity and reduced frustration.
Better application performance has also encouraged the IT team to implement more
business applications like SharePoint for budgeting and consolidation. One of the big
advantages was also being able to create two policies for mobile clients by installing
WebFilter on roaming laptops – one for home use, allowing users flexibility to listen
to music, watch movies etc and another for office use when he/ she connects to the
corporate network.

IT Roadmap
The plan in terms of IT infrastructure now is to connect many more subsidiaries
including the disaster recovery site and implement WAN Optimization in all these newly
connected sites. The company also intends implementing Blue Coat PacketShaper with
the objective of reserving bandwidth for mission critical real-time applications like video
conferencing which the company has plans of introducing in the future.
Around 8 months ago, Dubai Investments started work on introducing the concept
of cloud computing. This vision is to create a utility computing platform – a pool of
IT resources where each business head is given a control panel which will allow self
provisioning, thin provisioning and automatic configuration. Considering there are 46
subsidiaries, this is a very ambitious project which is expected to be completed in the
second quarter of 2010. Dubai Investments is also preparing itself for ISO 27001 and is
targeting the end of 2009/ first quarter 2010 for acquiring certification. Quite a few risks
under the connectivity area of the risk assessment framework have been addressed
through Blue Coat’s solutions.

About Dubai Investments

Dubai Investments is the largest investment company publicly traded on the Dubai stock
market. It invests worldwide in “viable and profitable” companies. It has a paid up capital
of AED 3.2 billion, 46 subsidiary companies and over 23,500 shareholders.

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