The implementation of HENNGE One has eliminated any cloud access from devices and locations not known and controlled by the systems department.
— Tell us about Hotel Monterey’s unique characteristics.
Hotel Monterey was established in 1986 as a hotel offering guests a high quality of relaxation based on the theme of traditions and lifestyles nurtured in European culture beginning in the Middle Ages. Currently, we have 20 hotels in 11 cities throughout Japan. Each hotel is based on the concept of a different European city, allowing guests to enjoy an exotic view of the world from the moment they step into the hotel.
We plan to open more hotels in the future to meet the growing inbound demand and to prepare for the 2020 Olympics. The Information Systems Department, to which I belong, is responsible for the operation of the IT infrastructure of Hotel Monterey and other group companies, including Maruit, the parent company and real estate management company, Zui En Resort, a golf business, and Sanno Facilities, a facility management company.
— What was the background behind the implementation of Microsoft 365 and HENNGE One?
Before we introduced Microsoft 365, e-mail was device-dependent, and e-mail was stored on the device used by each user. On the other hand, it was not always the case that each person had their own device, and in many departments, such as the food and beverage department, a single PC was shared by multiple employees. And the entire group was in a similar environment, using different domains and addresses as needed.
Another characteristic of our company is that transfers between offices and departments within the company occur relatively frequently. Each time this happened, we had to migrate the data, but since the terminals were not completely tied to the individual, the migration work became a huge burden.
In addition, employees who work outside the office, such as salespeople, have many opportunities to check their e-mail outside the office, but if their devices were lost or stolen, it could lead to the leakage of personal information, and we were concerned about security.
Amidst these circumstances, in 2018, an incident occurred in which a backdoor was installed on the server of an overseas company with which we do business, and customer data was illegally accessed. As it was just after the GDPR (EU General Data Protection Regulation) came into effect, we decided to consider improving our e-mail environment as part of our efforts to protect personal information. We decided that the best way to achieve a terminal-independent e-mail environment was to use cloud services.
— How did you go about considering specific services?
We started gathering information in early 2018. Until then, we had left the core system that handled our business operations, such as the reservation system, to a certain manufacturer-affiliated vendor, but we also wanted to avoid vendor lock-in, where we were completely dependent on one vendor, so we approached multiple vendors.
We had decided on either Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace based on their track record and reliability, but since we had been primarily using Outlook and other Microsoft products, we decided to go with Microsoft HENNGE One is a mobile, secure, and easy-to-use solution that allows users to work from anywhere, anytime.
HENNGE One was highly evaluated for its reliable security for mobile use, its email sending/receiving archiving function, and its attachment ZIP encryption function. From a security standpoint, the ability to reliably track logs was also a key point. Another major advantage was the ability to limit the number of devices that can be used from outside the company by using HENNGE One device certificates.
— How did you proceed with the implementation process?
We started the implementation process in January 2019. First, we implemented the system in departments other than the hotel, where the number of employees was small. After confirming that there were no problems there, we rolled it out to the entire company, including the hotels, and it went smoothly with no particular problems.
Currently, the entire group has 1,300 licenses, about 80% of which are for hotels. We also took this opportunity to assign a unique address to every employee who uses e-mail.
— Please tell us about the effects of the introduction.
First of all, the integrated management of e-mail on the cloud has ensured security, and the restrictions imposed by IP address control and HENNGE One device certificates have eliminated any access from locations and devices that we in the Systems Department do not know or control. This has been a big factor in our success.
Users have also commented that it is now easier for them to check their e-mail outside the office. In the past, unauthorized users had to forward emails sent to their PCs to their smartphones in order to check emails from outside the office, but now that they can access their emails in the cloud at any time, they no longer forward emails to their smartphones.
It has also become easier to switch devices. The group is currently in the process of migrating to Windows 10 in preparation for the end of support for Windows 7, but since the data is no longer stored on each device thanks to the cloud, this migration work is no longer necessary. Thanks to this, the operational burden on our systems department has also been reduced.
As I mentioned earlier, there are many transfers at the hotel, so there are frequent opportunities to change PC settings. In the past, due to the hassle of such work, users would often take their own PCs with them to their new locations, but now that we are no longer dependent on the device, we expect to see fewer such cases.
We also use the HENNGE One e-mail error prevention function. When sending an e-mail outside the company, we have set the system to put the e-mail on hold for three minutes after it is sent, so that if we notice an error during that time, we can stop it. This has made it possible to prevent accidents such as information leaks.
— Did you encounter any problems after the introduction of the system?
We had many inquiries at the beginning, but so far we have had no major problems. The only problem is that since attached files in e-mails to customers are encrypted, it was not always possible to decrypt them unless the customer had installed a decryption tool, for example, if the customer was an individual using a smartphone. We have addressed this issue by changing the operation so that e-mails sent from a shared address are not encrypted.
— Do you have any plans for the future?
As a company that handles our customers’ important personal information, we will continue to strengthen our security measures, and we look forward to receiving advice from HENNGE on how to make our services even safer and more useful.