Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 32 | Page 65

CASE STUDY S ecure and reliable data communications are essential when you possess the world’s largest fleet of vessels for transporting liquid natural gas. The Qatar Gas Transport Company Ltd, known as Nakilat, which is Arabic for ‘carrier’ has 65 liquid natural gas ships and four liquid petroleum gas ships that operate as a ‘floating pipeline’ carrying Qatari gas around the world. The fleet represents 12% of total world carrying capacity. To support this, Nakilat has a complex network of wholly owned and joint-venture operations in ship repair, construction, shipping agencies, warehousing and other maritime support services. Nakilat recently consolidated its IT operations into a single organisation. As CIO Hamad Suwaid said: “The biggest challenge was bringing everyone together and enabling secure access to information from anywhere in the world.” After evaluating numerous vendors, Nakilat decided that Fujitsu demonstrated the best technology, expertise and cost-effectiveness. Together with Fujitsu, the firm rolled out SAP HANA using Citrix and Microsoft Azure with the Fujitsu Integrated System PRIMEFLEX platform, combined with Fujitsu FlexFrame Orchestrator for SAP, as the basis for a highly efficient cloud solution. The centralised IT operation serves a complex mix of recently acquired businesses and joint-venture operations. Because of this, it uses a hybrid IT environment that combines Microsoft Azure cloud resources THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE WAS BRINGING EVERYONE TOGETHER AND ENABLING SECURE ACCESS TO INFORMATION FROM ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD with its own on-premises data centre. Citrix NetScaler provides secure access to Nakilat’s on-premises resources, including Microsoft SharePoint and SAP. Hamad said: “All of our internal application publishing uses NetScaler, and it also provides load- balancing across our services.” Nakilat uses Citrix XenApp to virtualise its core business applications so that remote and joint-venture users have access to Nakilat information and resources. NetScaler interoperates seamlessly with Azure ID Management to ensure security for all users. Effective and secure sharing of apps and information with third-party, joint-venture partners Nakilat now saves time and money by sharing access to information and applications with users from partner organisations. For example, Nakilat holds millions of dollars’ worth of spare parts for its ships. By using Citrix to securely share its inventory, kept on SAP, with its shipping joint-venture partners, Nakilat can supply any required parts to ships when they dock to take on their cargo of gas. With a cross-fleet view of requirements and inventory, Nakilat avoids over-stocking expensive parts. By making the ordering, delivery and fitting of spares more www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 65