We were able to save a lot of money despite the fact that we also built a global authentication infrastructure and strengthened e-mail security.
— Please give us an overview of Kawai Gakki Seisakusho and Kawai Business Software’s business.
Kawai Gakki Seisakusho was founded in 1927. Kawai is a world-class musical instrument manufacturer headquartered in Hamamatsu City, Shizuoka Prefecture, whose core business is the manufacture and sale of pianos. The company has 70 directly managed stores in Japan that provide piano sales and after-sales support, as well as music schools with more than 4,200 teaching locations and over 100,000 students. Kawai Business Software is a subsidiary of Kawai Gakki Seisakusho, Inc. that sells system equipment and develops software, and is also responsible for the operation and management of the parent company’s mission-critical systems and IT infrastructure.
— Please tell us about the background behind the implementation of HENNGE One
The main reason we decided to implement Office 365 (now Microsoft 365) in 2018. In moving our email to the cloud, we needed to achieve access control equivalent to on-premise, which is not a standard feature of Office 365.
The on-premise product we had been using prior to deploying Office 365 was an on-premise product. We used to copy the sent e-mail data to an archive server for storage, and then archive the data that had passed a certain period of time on a different server. This made it very difficult just to browse emails that were several months old, and the response time was poor, so we decided to look for a new system when we migrated to Exchange Online.
— You must have compared other companies’ products, but what made you decide to use HENNGE One?
We looked at a number of other companies’ products, including options such as cloud services or on-premise. The bottleneck was the e-mail archiving function. Most of the products had restrictions on retention period and capacity, and it was difficult to find a service that could meet our retention period. In addition, in many cases, other companies’ products could provide access control but not e-mail archiving, or could provide e-mail archiving and anti-misdirection measures but not access control, so we had no choice but to introduce a combination of multiple services.
It was at this time that our vendor introduced us to HENNGE One. The fact that the mail archive has unlimited capacity and the number of years can be obtained to meet our company’s rules was very attractive. Moreover, HENNGE One had a set of functions that we wanted to use now or in the future, such as access control and e-mail error countermeasures.
It is easier to use a single set of functions rather than using separate services for each function, and we estimated that HENNGE One would be far less expensive than other companies. For example, the cost of installing HENNGE One was almost the same as the cost of installing another company’s product that only provides mail archiving and anti-message functionality. The fact that HENNGE One had all the functions we wanted and the cost advantage were decisive factors in our decision to adopt HENNGE One.
— Please tell us about your current use of HENNGE One.
Actually, we use HENNGE Email Archive most frequently. We used to archive only outgoing emails, but with HENNGE One, we can archive both incoming and outgoing emails, so we can respond immediately to any inquiries from users about their incoming and outgoing emails. The user interface is easy to use and very useful.
— Please tell us about other functions you are using.
We have access control at all of our locations in Japan, allowing access to Microsoft 365 only from within the company. On the other hand, we have received requests to check e-mails from home and on the road, so we use HENNGE Secure Browser, mainly for management staff. Regarding the transmission of large files, we are promoting the use of HENNGE Secure Transfer. In particular, the advertising department often handles large files, so they seem to use it a lot.
— What were the effects of actually introducing HENNGE One?
The biggest effect was cost reduction. We used to use different services for e-mail archiving and sending large files, but we were able to cancel them all and consolidate them into HENNGE One.
The access control and other functional aspects of the service have been as effective as initially expected. It is like air in a good sense, and most employees use HENNGE One without being aware of it. As for HENNGE Secure Transfer, which is used directly by users, only a simple manual was prepared, and the function was so easy to understand that users were able to use it immediately. Considering it as a company infrastructure, I think it is a very easy-to-use product.
— Are there any functions you would like to use in the future?
We would like to use the e-mail error countermeasure and encryption functions in the future. We are considering the possibility of using them in the future, and we would like to carefully formulate operational rules to determine under what conditions an e-mail is considered a misdirected transmission. Currently, access control is implemented only at our domestic offices. In the future, we would like to expand the scope of application of access control to include employees dispatched overseas, and we would like to consider control using device certificates.