Dubai Investments deploys Blue Coat application delivery network infrastructure

With Blue Coat appliances, Dubai Investments has been able to accelerate business-critical applications while containing and lowering ongoing WAN costs. Dubai Investments has also improved file and application response times for its remote and travelling users, while enabling its regional offices to gain "direct to the 'net" access to services through use of ProxySG and ProxyAV appliances deployed in conjunction with Blue Coat WebFilter software.

Dubai Investments is the largest investment company publicly traded on the Dubai stock market. With a paid up capital of Dhs3.2bn and investments worldwide, this distributed organization must constantly communicate with all of its client organizations to access enterprise applications, such as a centralized Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, email, centrally stored files and Internet content and applications.

"Our business demanded a solution that would optimize and secure the flow of information across any of our distributed locations and for any remote user. The Blue Coat installation has considerably reduced our bandwidth consumption over the WAN and across our Internet connections enabling us to contain network costs while boosting employee productivity and expediting business processes."

said Mr. Manohar K, IT Advisor of Dubai Investments.

Before its deployment of Blue Coat ProxySG appliances, Dubai Investments had considered increasing the MPLS bandwidth for its WAN, but found that WAN optimization offered a more cost-effective solution by addressing underlying performance issues rather than providing a temporary solution.

Now with "direct to the 'net" Internet access, Dubai Investments' remote office installations split traffic so that enterprise data (such as ERP traffic, email and access of centrally stored files) go directly to the headquarters, while Web traffic goes out locally via broadband connections. The same ProxySG appliance that accelerates applications across the WAN also serves to protect the traffic to and from the direct Internet connection.

"Blue Coat ProxySG appliances provide a decisive advantage to distributed enterprises and organizations by accelerating applications and the business processes that they enable, while also providing security," said Nidal Taha, Regional Director for ME and Turkey, Blue Coat Systems. "We are proud to supply Dubai Investments with solutions that make available WAN optimization and Web security to all users in its organisation and to client companies, while reducing overall operational costs."