Industry Standards Networking & Security Solution Implemented for a leading Construction company in UAE
Our client is a one of the largest and well respected contractors for the execution of major projects in the GCC with a project portfolio consisting of high-end complex construction projects, predominately in the airports, retail, themed hospitality and commercial sectors. The customer was running a setup of legacy servers/networking devices and were facing issues with performance, reliability and increasing renewal expenditure. A combination of leading security & networking solutions were implemented replacing the components appliances resulting in improved performance, increased reliability & reduced operating costs.
Business Scenario
The Group was faced with a challenge of running an infrastructure comprising of legacy appliances which had a direct risk associated with the availability of critical business services and were facing scalability issues. The performance, availability and security of the service were of key importance for ensuring that the business is not impacted. Along with the increased growth there was a need to match the IT infrastructure to the industry standards. To meet their strategic goal for improving service quality, reliability and efficiency, the customer engaged with Intertec to revamp the entire data center along with the latest generation networking devices and best-of-breed security solution.
Challenges
- Ageing network and security components
- Scalability challenges to meet expanding business requirements
- Security Risks inherited by the system architecture
Solution
An assessment of the customer’s infrastructure was done and the constraints were identified. The customer had planned to move from their own datacenter to a hosted data center service provider. Along with the migration of hosting services, a revamp of the network and security services were planned. Intertec engaged with the customer and designed the new infrastructure layout, which was in par with the industry standards.
Intertec proposed revamping the network infrastructure and replacing the existing devices with the latest 10G enabled networking devices. This gave a major boost to the network performance. A two-tiered firewall architecture was designed and implemented to ensure security at two places in the network i.e. at the perimeter and at the core.
The perimeter firewall implemented was a Next Generation Firewall and was responsible for performing the required security checks before the traffic enters/exits the corporate network. The Core firewall acts as the second layer of protection and also controls the traffic to/from the server farm where the servers running the critical business applications are hosted. A next generation firewall was also implemented at the HO to provide the required security to the corporate infrastructure. The firewalls also provided a secure channel for communication between the Data center and the Head Offices in form of a VPN connection.
As a result, the major advantages that were gained on deploying the combination of network & security solutions were:
- Implementation of an industry standard datacenter with higher performance and reliability
- Implementation a secure access to datacenter from Head office and Site offices
- Technical upgrade of HO network resulting in increased network performance & better end-user experience
- Elimination of possible downtime related risks due to ageing hardware
- Savings on Operational costs
Results
- Fast, Reliable and Scalable infrastructure
- Industry Standard Security posture
- Reduced operational costs