SALAMA migrates to SonicWALL's UTM security platform

The new infrastructure was put in place to manage the company's growing business and network security requirements covering its headquarters in Dubai and its six branch offices there. Over the next twelve months, SALAMA intends to roll out the solution to support over 1,500 employees across the region in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Senegal and Nigeria.

SALAMA's previous network security infrastructure, which relied on traditional Cisco routers and firewalls, was approaching the upper limits of its capabilities. And as Internet based security threats began to proliferate over the past few years, the company decided to invest to securing its business critical resources from viruses, malware and intrusive attacks.

"As a leading regional financial organization, the prime objective from revamping our security infrastructure was to secure our network from threats and intrusive elements emanating from the Internet. We also wanted to increase employee productivity by elevating the rate of application access, especially to our six branch offices in Dubai,"

said Rao Khalid Ali Alam, SALAMA's IT Manager.

"With over 200,000 clients in the region, we had to make sure that our bandwidth resources were well managed so that 150 concurrent users could work seamlessly in a secure environment to best serve our customers' interests."

SALAMA's eight person strong technology team worked closely with SonicWALL and GWC Networks, SonicWALL's partner in the project, to complete the deployment in a record time of one working week. Within SALAMA's data center one PRO 5060 appliance was configured as the gateway with multi-gigabit performance high-speed intrusion prevention, content filtering, gateway-enforced anti-virus and ultimate scalability to manage incoming and outgoing data traffic. A PRO 2040 appliances appliance was configured to manage the LAN (Large Area Network) and failover requirements. A costly lease line was replaced by two ADSL connections with two TZ 150 and TZ 170 appliances respectively deployed for 'Clean VPN' (Virtual Private Network) connectivity to branch office and remote worker access at speeds approaching traditional LAN (Large Area Network) environments.

"Security is becoming a growing concern for companies of all sizes, especially those that operate with sensitive information communicated to and from branch offices," said Shahnawaz Sheikh, SonicWALL regional sales manager Middle East and Africa (MEA). "With our comprehensive gateway security and VPN technology SALAMA will benefit from increased employee productivity rates and more bandwidth resources, all in a secure, easy to manage network environment."

SALAMA's IT team will be able to access real time intelligent reports on network events such as security threats, employee Internet usage and bandwidth consumption through SonicWALL's ViewPoint Web-based tool. Such comprehensive reporting capabilities will provide SALAMA's IT team with instant insight into the health of the network and enable them to better manage growth and plan for future needs.

"SALAMA is a unique organization and its investment in network security was felt immediately by its progressive management team and its employees," said Sandeep Kumar, Business Development Manager of GWC Networks LLC, "With a solid and secure network infrastructure and a well trained and experienced technology team, SALAMA can now easily scale its network to accommodate growth."