Juniper Networks announced that it is enabling Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) to deliver a comprehensive, unified e-government program by offering switching, routing and security solutions.

With the help of Juniper Networks’ (News - Alert) switching, routing and security solutions, Saudi Arabia's MCIT is building a high-performance network and data center infrastructure.

MCIT is responsible for the deployment and management of IT and network-based services across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, such as broadcast, digital and telephony activities. It is focused on the integration of services that affects as many citizens as possible and also help to support the kingdom’s socio-economic development.

According to a press release, MCIT picked Juniper’s network solutions to create the infrastructure as a platform for the Kingdom's nation-wide e-Government project called "Yesser."

Yesser will enable many other government departments to interact with each other and citizens online. This e-Government program will be integrated with numerous information and communication technologies. It is expected that this program will significantly increase the Kingdom's return on investment in its networks to provide faster, easier-to-use services and transactions for government organizations and their commercial and constituent clients.

Ahmad Y. Alkhiary, assistant director general of Ministry of Communications and Information Technology for Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, said in a statement, "Our e-government initiative is designed to raise the productivity and efficiency of the public sector in Saudi Arabia and further improve the quality of life and value we can deliver to our citizens."

Alkhiary added, "By introducing services through electronic transactions, we can utilize information technology to its best advantage and also control costs. The Juniper Networks solution for MCIT will reduce the cost and complexity of our data center network, delivering a dynamic, flexible and automated solution without sacrificing performance."

Officials with Juniper said that the e-Government program by MCIT will utilize the company’s EX4200 Series Ethernet Switches with virtual chassis fabric technology, in order to provide high availability for MCIT's hosting services at the data center and among its agencies.

MCIT will also deploy Juniper Networks’s J Series Services Routers as a branch deployment to standardize service delivery and provide stability and efficiency for all agencies and the central site. The MCIT will also install Juniper Networks’ M Series Multiservice Edge Routers for advanced routing with carrier-class reliability for the high-performance network.

For centralized configuration and threat, compliance and log management, MCIT will install Juniper Networks’ Network and Security Manager and STRM Series Security Threat Response Manager solutions, for the e-Government program. These solutions will help in maximizing end-to-end network security and performance.

In addition, MCIT will also leverage Juniper Networks SSG Series Secure Services Gateways and ISG Series Integrated Security Gateways to get complete protection against all types of internal, external, current and emerging network- and application-layer attacks. MCIT will install Juniper Networks SA Series SSL VPN Appliances to provide remote users with secure access to corporate resources from any Web browser.

Officials with Juniper said that the company’s routing and switching platforms run on Junos software, which is the company’s single-source operating system “OS.” This OS will enable MCIT to seamlessly and cost-effectively deploy and accelerate its next-generation network services as well as improve reliability and performance of the network.