Cisco has announced that Bahri & Mazroei Trading Company (BMTC), one of the UAE’s providers of solutions for building and infrastructure development, has successfully deployed a comprehensive suite of Cisco security solutions as part of its ‘Smart’ initiatives focus.
System Integrator, Emitech helped BMTC implement Cisco Next Generation Firewall, which integrated ASA 5545 – X with FirePOWER Services, Cisco FireSight Management centre 750, Cisco URL filtering service and Cisco Advanced Malware Protection.
Speaking about the implementation, Madhusuthan, BMTC’s IT Manager said, “As part of our smart initiatives focus, we were looking for a new security solution that not only met our IT and compliance policy requirements but also acted as a business enabler instead of just monitoring, controlling and restricting our users’ online activities. Our systems integration partner, EMTECH studied our IT infrastructure and requirements and came up with their recommendations, which included a suite of solutions from Cisco.
As part of the process, we also evaluated several security solutions in the market and concluded that Cisco ASA with FirePOWER services came closest to fulfilling our requirements. This coupled with the fact that BMTC has already been using Cisco’s technology solutions for over a decade proved that the decision to integrate a Cisco security portfolio made absolute sense.”
A first for security deployments in the UAE With this implementation, BMTC becomes one of the first companies in the UAE to deploy Cisco ASA with FirePOWER services since the solution was launched in the UAE in September 2014.
“Every day, UAE organisations like ours are faced with new threats that are becoming more and more innovative in the ways they infiltrate and attack our environment. This deployment from Cisco is enabling us to take a much more mature approach to our advanced threat protection efforts,” commented Esam Al Mazroei, BMTC’s Managing Director.
“Cisco ASA with FirePOWER services, offers industry’s first adaptive, threat-focused next-generation firewall (NGFW), which will deliver us with comprehensive protection from known and advanced threats, including protection against targeted and persistent malware attacks. We are confident Cisco Security Solutions will help protect and defend our IT and network infrastructure against advanced threats while also reducing complexity and costs. The solution is also helping us with effective utilisation of Internet bandwidth and end-user browsing capabilities with next-generation features and security,” Madhusuthan added.
Emitech were tasked with studying BMTC’s IT infrastructure and requirements to identify the bottlenecks. “Our role in this project was to identify the pain points of IT security by understanding what is happening on the Company’s network level, bringing better visibility in terms of protection and recommending the best solution which would lead to effective data centre security and business productivity. Based on the comprehensive study we undertook, we identified some key problem areas on Malware, Application visibility and Control, and User visibility and Control. Based on these problems we matched the same with Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services,” explained Vijayan K Raman, Managing Director of Emitech.
Emitech successfully implemented the Cisco security solution, trained the BMTC’s IT team on its administration and has been providing the customer continuous service support. “As a leading security vendor in the UAE, Cisco is focused on developing integrated security solutions that help our customers be proactive and align the right people, processes, and technology. What they need is a threat-centric approach to security with protection along the full attack continuum.
We applaud BMTC for taking the lead in implementing dynamic controls to manage the pace of change of their IT and network environment and address security incidents with Cisco’s suite of security solutions, which will provide- them with an integrated yet robust threat defense to address their biggest security challenges – before, during and after an attack,” Rabih Dabboussi, General Manager – UAE, Cisco concluded.
