Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) was founded in 1980 as an umbrella organization to manage the country’s diversified oil interests. As a group, KPC is actively involved in every aspect of the oil and gas industry. It engages itself in activities that range from discovering new reservoirs to delivering clean and safe fuel for motor vehicles, airplanes, ships, agriculture, and power stations.

The Challenge: Controlling the sharing of company data

Without a professional file sharing solution, there was little control over data and files being sent - via a variety of file sharing services. With restrictions on the sizes of files that could be sent via email, KPC was concerned that employees could potentially be sharing large files using freeware products. This meant that company confidential data could be residing in uncontrolled public cloud environments.

“File sharing using freeware tools was a concern and the corporation needed to protect its data,” said Mr. Qais Al Doub, Senior Systems Analyst, KPC. “As well as data security concerns, this practice could pose risks in relation to regulatory compliance,” he added.

The recent high-profile security breaches in the Gulf region resulted in crucial data being lost for some of those organizations. KPC wanted to proactively tackle the issue before it posed a challenge for the business. It, therefore, needed a solution that would allow individuals and departments the ability to simply store and access data, irrespective of the device on which it resided.

The Solution: An enterprise follow-me data solution

The IT department was tasked to identify an easily operated solution to allow files to be stored centrally and securely and shared easily via any device, internally and externally. The new solution had to allow KPC to maintain ownership, control, and management of the data. The organization needed an enterprise follow-me data solution delivering a robust data sharing and synchronization service to meet the mobility and collaboration needs of its users and its own data security requirements.

“From the solutions we investigated, only ShareFile® offered the data sharing, storage and sync service we needed," said Mr. Al Doub. “A key analyst rated it a strong positive, which meant it was a strong candidate for us to investigate.”

The next step was running a proof of concept and this testing phase validated what the review team had heard and read. With the excellent support of the local partner, EEMC, ShareFile was rolled-out as per the schedule. Everything went without a hitch, providing secure file sharing and data sync via any device.

The organization now has a solution that allows the sharing and syncing of any file, of any size, via any device running on any platform, to any recipient. Importantly, it retains the information and control within its own private cloud.

“The solution has been so successful that many organizations within the region are talking with us and following our lead in private cloud data synchronization and storage,” said Mr. Al Doub.

Key Benefits

Secure, compliant data sharing and business continuity

“The KPC IT department previously had some challenges providing employees access to files on their PCs, when this was required to be done from outside KPC premises. This was especially a problem when using mobile devices. Now, ShareFile has resolved this problem,” said Mr. Abdulaziz Al Sultan, IT Manager, KPC.

KPC now has a true enterprise follow-me data solution. This helps ensure that it will not face potential data-loss and interruption to business, which other organizations have suffered.

Users’ feedback has also been very favourable. They not only have a simple and secure method of sending large files, they can also synchronize their data with other devices they may use. As well as improved business flexibility and productivity, they now have a multi-device backup solution.

“Previously, storage and synchronization was USB centric, especially for our users” said Mr. Al Doub. “Now with ShareFile, we have enabled the next evolution of data storage within KPC,” he concluded.

Being the organization responsible for managing the country’s oil interests, it is important that it controls and manages the sharing of sensitive data and files. Now, all file-sharing is managed within the KPC private cloud - not an unknown and uncontrolled external environment.

Looking Ahead

With a successful implementation of ShareFile and a growing Virtual Apps base, the organization is now looking to Citrix ADC to give it better control of application delivery, server load balancing, security, and application acceleration.

Now with ShareFile we have enabled the next evolution of data storage within KPC.

Mr Qais Al Doub
Senior Systems Analyst
KPC