Data#3

The Toyota Tsusho South Pacific Holdings’ office locations read like a luxury cruising itinerary – but managing major automotive brands across seven islands from Papua New Guinea to Vanuatu and Tonga brings more than its fair share of challenges. Owned by Toyota Tsusho Corporation (Japan), it supports the Toyota, Yamaha and Hino brands, as well as other high profile products from its South Pacific regional head office in Brisbane. A central team of six people manage and maintain the information and communication systems for 1300 employees scattered over 30 sites.

A global security initiative for Toyota Tsusho focusing on email security prompted a greenfield refresh and consolidation of the disparate IT environments. “A key business driver was the requirement to manage and control every device throughout the entire South Pacific group, from a centralised location” said Dinesh Chand, Group IT Manager at Toyota Tsusho South Pacific Holdings.

Growing Volume, Uncontrolled Risks

“Our email in particular was experiencing rapid growth in data volume – in both our mail storage and [Microsoft] Exchange databases – this was not only costly but also slowing our mail systems,” said Dinesh Chand. “More concerning was the huge risk of data loss at the end point. We knew that if this eventuated, we had no capacity for fast and efficient recovery.

“From the perspective of end users, the system was unwieldy and frustrating to use, and was causing network performance issues. Locating past emails was a hit and miss time-consuming affair with no systematic process for simple search or email retrieval.”

Toyota Tsusho South Pacific Holdings engaged Data^#3, a leading ASX-listed information and communications technology company with offices nationally and almost 500 staff, to design and implement a centralised structure to enable central control within a single security platform. The installation went smoothly, with the solution’s simplified deployment and administration processes enabling Toyota Tsusho to get it up and running in days. Its inbuilt wizards and best practice dashboards ensure easy day-to-day management.

“Our corporate intellectual property is protected and the entire messaging environment is visible and secure. We have a centralised and indexed archive that can be searched on demand, and emails and other content are securely preserved.”
Dinesh Chand, Group IT Manager, Toyota Tsusho South Pacific Holdings

“We wanted to work with an experienced information and communication technology solutions company with the expertise to ensure optimal integration and seamless service,” said Dinesh Chand. “Data^#3 has a track record of delivering exceptional value in integrated solutions, and they were instrumental in helping us achieve our business goals on this project.”

Centralising for Control, Consistency and Cost-Savings

“Toyota Tsusho was already successfully using Symantec Backup Exec with Multi-tier Protection to help manage its growing data volumes and ensure that everything was backed up securely in an acceptable time frame,” explained Jean-Pierre Simonis, Integrated Solutions Consultant at Data^#3. “The group had a previous version of Symantec’s Enterprise Vault, with a separate server in each of the seven islands. We designed a centralised system to overcome the inconsistencies inherent with that type of disparate design and its associated management headaches. This new design would import all existing data into the upgraded system without issue. Now, a single instance of Enterprise Vault hosted in Brisbane schedules all the email archiving from each remote location to the central point, as well as integrates with the latest version of Symantec Backup Exec, the chosen backup solution for all internal platforms.”

“Our confidence in the Symantec solution was based on our past experience with Backup Exec,” said Dinesh Chand. “And we knew that Enterprise Vault is the industry leader in email and content archiving, managing millions of mailboxes worldwide. We were confident it would meet our needs, and grow with our company – and with Symantec backing the solution we would always have excellent support on hand.”
Symantec Enterprise Vault employs policy-based archiving so unstructured data that does not require frequent access is moved from high-cost T1 disk storage, and archived to lower cost storage utilising compression and deduplication to also reduce storage requirements while ensuring end user accessibility.

Its unified platform can archive across multiple content sources including Exchange, Domino, SharePoint, IM and file servers into a central repository. The Symantec PST/NSF migration tool archives unmanaged personal email messages and attachments, enabling the IT department to effectively eradicate the use of personal email store files and regain control of the company information. Utilising optimised Single-Instance-Storage, Enterprise Vault efficiently archives information by storing just one copy of a file or message, regardless of the number of times it occurs or where it is stored, lowering storage costs again by reducing the overall archive size.

Protection Plus Productivity

As well as cutting storage costs, Toyota Tsusho South Pacific Holdings has realised savings in management costs with significant reductions in the time spent in IT support of the end user environment. The previous disparate solution resulted in a complex user environment, prone to failure and with a prolonged recovery time. The installation of Symantec Enterprise Vault has reduced the amount of support required and slashed the recovery timeframe.

“By centralising all our old emails back into Exchange, Enterprise Vault has optimised our server storage and ensured that backups and server management are performed where our technical skills are concentrated,” said Dinesh Chand.

The real gains, however, have been in end user productivity and security. Enterprise Vault is designed to be a seamless extension to the messaging applications already used by end users, such as Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes or SharePoint, giving visible access to archived information, even from mobile devices.

“Emails are not left on our users machines – so PC performance has improved noticeably. With 1300 employees using faster machines with improved functionality, reduced backup time and the ability to search and retrieve archived emails over the Web, the productivity gains Enterprise Vault has delivered are significant. End users have full access to all their emails, so they’re happy with the solution,” said Dinesh Chand.

“The fact that we’ve achieved this while massively improving our security is a real win. Information contained in messages and our corporate intellectual property is suitably protected and the entire messaging environment is visible and secure. We have a centralised and indexed archive that can be searched “on demand” and emails and other content are securely preserved according to policy.

“The group has also benefited from reduced storage and backup costs, but more important is the reduction in risk and the automatic and cost-effective compliance with our corporate policies.”

Click here to download the Toyota Tsusho case study.

To learn more about how Data^#3 can assist your organisation, call 1300 23 28 23, or Enquire Online.