Mr. Itaru Kato, manager of the IT division at Yoshimoto Administration, explained the background behind the replacement of their information system saying, “We had been using a Microsoft Exchange Server in the server room of our Tokyo office since 2007. The mail server design was dated and we needed to take measures to expand the system such as updating the hardware and upgrading software versions. The Great East Japan Earthquake then struck. We were forced to rethink the disaster recovery measures of our information system from the bottom up. Should we consider relocating the mail server and transferring it to a safe external datacenter rather than operating it in our server room?”

However, they could foresee personnel-based logistical problems in attempting to operate the mail servers themselves, even if they did decide to use an external datacenter. - If a disaster occurred, would anyone be able to rush to the datacenter to confirm whether the mail server was working normally? - Could the staff member who rushed to the datacenter really restore the system at that time?

As Kato also anticipated that unexpected troubles might occur in times of disaster, the company began to consider a cloud-based email service instead of operating a server themselves. As a result, they examined a range of services and decided to introduce Google Apps.

Yoshimoto Administration therefore began looking for a solution to enhance security in cooperation with Google Apps.

Yoshimoto Administration announces events and campaigns and calls for participation in them by email, which means that the staff often send emails to many recipients at once.

Mr. Kato expresses his concerns regarding the information leakage risk in mass-emailing, contemplating aloud, “If someone entered customer email addresses into the “To” or “Cc” fields by mistake, and sent it without noticing…”.

Information leakage, including leakage of email addresses, has recently become a major problem and can erode trust in any company responsible for it.

Active! gate SS prevents erroneous email sending resulting from “small mistakes” in various ways*. The main focus of Yoshimoto Administration was the “Auto-Bcc” function which automatically moves email addresses in the “To” and “Cc” fields to the “Bcc field” to prevent the leakage of email addresses.

*Active! gate SS prevents erroneous email sending by using 7 approaches.

Yoshimoto Administration has a problem typical of content production companies. They often send large video files to multiple destinations at once by email. Consequently, individual mail boxes can become full immediately. In addition, Google Apps provides only 25GB of email storage. As a result, the company decided to adopt Active! vault SS to store emails safely.

Active! vault SS, a cloud-based email archive service, enables searches of archived emails by keywords, confirms the delivery status, and provides anti-virus and anti-spam services.

“After switching our email system to Google Apps, our business affairs depend on email now more than ever. Active! vault SS is an excellent service which allows us to archive email data automatically, safely and easily, and reduces the workload required for the operation,” says Mr. Kato, confirming the importance of the email archive service, and the other valued services of Active! vault SS.