Before introducing Gmail, Palace Hotel Tokyo constructed their original email server and created a web-based email environment for hotel staff. Because the system administrators in the ICT Room were constantly faced with the task of maintaining the system, the hotel started to consider replacing the email system with a cloud-based service.

“More than half of our guests are overseas visitors. As most communications with them are done by email, stable operation of the web email system and the security measures required are important issues for us,” says Mr. Yuji Maeda, ICT Manager at Palace Hotel Tokyo, explaining the vital role that email plays in the hotel’s business.

The main factor influencing the selection of the email service was whether the service could offer enhanced security measures and archiving functions. After contemplating the options, the hotel decided to adopt Google Apps; Active! gate SS and Active! vault SS were adopted to provide complementary security and archiving functions.

The Palace Hotel Tokyo ICT Room was focused on a solution which provided functions to prevent erroneous email sending as well as archiving functions.

“We used to focus on security measures for external threats such as anti-spam and anti-virus, but Google Apps features such measures as standard. Consequently, we wanted to prevent incidents caused by internal mistakes which could damage our business, such as erroneous email sending,” explains Mr. Yoshio Okutaki, director of ICT Room, regarding the hotel’s need for further security measures.

The hotel routinely uses email in communications with not only its guests, but also with its clients, meaning that measures to prevent erroneous email sending are indispensable for the continual maintenance of business communications.

“Another service which we viewed as important was email archiving. Considering that the mail server is on a cloud platform, we needed to find a method which could reliably save all the data,” says Maeda as to why the hotel was interested in Active! vault SS.

*Media recording plan is only available in Japan as of October, 2015.

Google Apps features the “Undo send” function which allows users to set an email sending cancellation period of up to 30 seconds. But will a person realize his or her mistake within 30 seconds? In many cases, the user finds out that they have sent an email in error after a few minutes have elapsed. The “customizable hold period” function of Active! gate SS enables users to incrementally set the period to hold the email.

The same also applies to the archiving service. Active! vault SS allows you to select a storage period of 1 year, 7 years, or 10 years. In the case of the 1-year plan, the archived data will be recorded on Blu-ray disc and sent to the customer once the archive period has elapsed*.

“We set the email holding term for external domains to 10 minutes. The sender can check the contents of the email before sending it out, and if he finds any mistakes he can safely stop the email from being sent. At first we were concerned that staff would feel that the extra 10 minutes was a hassle, but they felt that the safety afforded to them was more beneficial than the time delay. As a result, they are appreciative of the peace of mind that preventing erroneous sending provides,” says Mr. Okutaki, revealing the successes attained through adopting the service.

“We lock the Blu-ray discs which contain the archived email data in a safe, which essentially enables permanent email data archival,” concludes Mr. Maeda.