Kuwait Investment Office (KIO) invests for the future with state-of-the-art IT infrastructure

Financial services case study

The client

The Kuwait Investment Office (KIO) is based in the City of London and manages funds on behalf of the State of Kuwait. It was set up in 1953 with the aim of investing surplus oil revenues to reduce the reliance of Kuwait on its finite oil resource.

The State of Kuwait transfers 10% of the oil revenue into the Reserve for Future Generations each year, which is the overall responsibility of the Kuwait Investment Authority in Kuwait, the parent organisation of the KIO.

The KIO manages its funds as a global investor, with investments in all main geographical areas and asset classes, which are managed by portfolio managers on an active basis. It is a long term investor and the in house investment management team covers equities, fixed income, treasury, private equity and property. The KIO aims to produce out-performance relative to the benchmark and within specific risk parameters.

The challenge

When KIO moved offices it decided to take the opportunity to invest in a state-of-the-art IT infrastructure supported by an Intelligent Infrastructure Management (IIM) solution. This was a greenfield implementation and its priorities were to future proof the infrastructure as far as possible and to create an infrastructure that was resilient, efficient and easy to administer.

KIO chose Redstone Converged Solutions as it needed a company it could rely on, who were proactive and responsive with proven experience of delivering high-quality work on time.

Redstone Converged Solutions designed the resilient infrastructure so that in the future if the company needs to move staff around the building – including major moves that require walls to be shifted – it will be far easier to do so. The fact that the infrastructure is under the floor means all the rooms can be moved if required, and the result is a much neater, tidier and better working environment for staff.

The solution

KIO is already enjoying a wide range of benefits from its new infrastructure. The IIM solution is currently being used by KIO to support incident management, management reporting and fault diagnosis. It has made the job of managing the infrastructure far easier. It now only takes five minutes to connect a new application to the network.  The solution also shows what has been plugged in and where, and can run a full inventory if required to. This means that if a PC goes wrong it can be located very quickly, but another side to this is improved security as it is easier to spot malign intent,as the solution informs when something has been plugged in and provides alerts and full audit trails which enhance security.

The outcome

Tony Perkins, Network Architect at the Kuwait Investment Office says “The biggest gain is that I don’t have to worry about the infrastructure now. All of this is invisible to our staff and the only thing we see is positive change. With the help of Redstone Converged Solutions we now have a good foundation, as it’s no good putting a lot of expensive IT solutions onto an unstable infrastructure – so we’ve made sure that we’ve invested the time and money to get it right from the bottom up.”

To discuss this case study, and how Redstone Converged Solutions can help your organisation, contact us.