The Status of DUG IT Department, written by Ali kekhia, katkhada the head of IT highlighting the achievement in different areas

1. Ali katkhada
Head of IT department
2/Mar/2014
Depa United group had established a state of the art Centralized IT department which has been ranked
as the best department in the GCC by E&Y during 2009 Audit based on CoBit standards.
DUG IT department consist of five teams which cover all the IT activities as follow :
 Data Center: Taking care of the servers, blade servers, virtual servers, firewalls, security, backup,
disaster recovery site, Cloud storage.
 IT operation: Responsible for day to day activity of supporting end users utilizing service desk,
hotline, ticketing system. Furthermore, Putting standards of IT assets specifications, centralize
license management, catching deals and discounts.
 IT infrastructure : Responsible for establishing new site offices, structure cables, Voice over IP,
Communication system, wireless, satellites connectivity, Network, ..etc
 IT development: Responsible for in-house developments, tailored to our business needs, using
(Tablet/Mobile platforms, .Net, SQL, SharePoint, Web Technologies,..) developed and manage
more than 40 business applications which is live in production used across our group.
 ERP Systems: IT Department had implemented the most powerful ERP system which top fortune
companies and nine out of ten top banks in the world are using, Oracle e-Business
suite V.12.1.2. this system had created a paperless environment across our group, fully comply
with all the stock market standards , with back track for each and every transaction, fulfill audit
requirements, Standardization of business processes across group, measure Group Performance
using Consolidated Group Reports, are only few benefits of Oracle systems,
it automates the following area of business:
o HR and payroll through five modules (Core HR, Payroll, employee Selfsrevice, Manager
Selfservice, Oracle time and labor)
o Finance (General Ledger ,Account payable ,account receivable, cash management, Fixed
asset management, global intercompany management)
o Manufacturing (project manufacturing, work in process, and bill of material|)
o Supply chain / commercial through (purchasing, services procurement (subcontractor
management) , inventory management Landed cost management
o Project management (project cost management, project billing)
o More than thousand reports covering all domains of Management,
Operational and Financial in addition to executive dash boards and business
intelligence tools.
 The Group ERP systems are available in Four separate environments in our data center
(development ,training and testing, staging and production) to guarantee no unauthorized
access to business sensitive data.
 DUG IT Department had implemented ISO 27001 in Security, CoBit framework in IT processes,
ITIL in IT operation, Data protection Law in data center.
 IT Department had implemented state of the art backup Robotic system which will run every
night a full backup for all the group data. Furthermore, there are (weekly, monthly and annual
backup) all the data is stored in two different geographic locations.
 Following the world standards, Depa IT department infrastructure is fully redundant and fail
over in order to guarantee that Depa business will never be interrupted no matter what failure
occur in power, hardware, network and ISP because of this we were able to achieve the
availability above 90% during 2013.

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In order to achieve enterprise class IT service availability, we have established on 2011 a
disaster recovery site in Al Ain to guarantee that business continuity.
In an initiative to reduce risk and cost we have implemented the latest trend of cloud computing
by moving all the group data from local less secure storages to a centralized Cloud system
operate behind several layers of security and backup.
IT department had implemented very powerful Security systems in order to protect the business
data and emails from hackers and unauthorized access which consists of hardware firewall,
combined with software security solutions to achieve optimum security level with zero
successful hacking penetration out of thirty thousand attempts a month (in average during
2013).
DUG IT department has established a very comprehensive unified communication solution
covering all sites, subsidiaries and overseas with instance messaging, voice communication, web
conferencing which reduced international cost by 50%.
All sites and subsidiaries are connected to centralized Data center using secure VPN which
enable the business to operate form anywhere with high level of security