The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels Reduces Costs and Increases Efficiencies with Office 365

Companies all around the world are making the move to cloud computing.  Let’s learn why Microsoft was the choice for The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels in their move to embrace cloud computing!

“Office 365 has helped us to save costs, improve communications and reduce support needs, contributing to enhanced productivity.” --Shane Izaks, General Manager, Information Technology - The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels

The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels
The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, Limited (HSH) is the holding company of a group that is engaged in the ownership, development and management of prestigious hotel, commercial and residential properties in Asia, the United States and Europe, including the renowned Peninsula Hotel brand. The company has over 7000 employees worldwide.

IT Challenges
The global reach of HSH’s business and the 24/7 nature of the service industry make high resource investments difficult to avoid. “In our industry, there is always the challenge of IT infrastructure becoming too hardware and server-centric,” says Izaks. “We need to enable the continuous growth of our operations, while utilizing the expertise of our IT team. This creates a conflict, because increasing our on-premise hardware assets means increasing the amount of time our IT team spends managing them.”

Previously, HSH used an on-premise, legacy based e-mail system from Novell in a distributed architecture with servers in each location. Microsoft SharePoint 2007 was used as the corporate collaboration platform. HSH was keenly aware that continuously adding servers and sending large files around the network did not provide the flexibility and efficiency needed for the business strategy, and adopting cloud computing might be the solution. “The challenge for a round-the-clock business like ours is how to get the flexibility and speed to market with minimal disruption to operations,” says Izaks.

Solution and Benefits
In 2011, HSH began to look for a solution to this challenge. The company studied various cloud computing services on the market. Finally, HSH decided to deploy Microsoft Office 365. “The Microsoft solution won out because it offers a full package of benefits, including robust security, full integration, collaboration and flexibility to move at our own pace,” says Izaks.

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As a subscription service, Office 365 will reduce the costs of purchasing and managing hardware and software assets for HSH. “Having Office 365 in the environment we are looking at reducing costs by about 15-20%,” says Izaks. “And this will certainly increase as we move forward with the deployment. Office 365 will allow all our operations to stay connected at an affordable price.”

Furthermore, unlike other vendors, Microsoft’s cloud solution can be fully integrated and co-exist with on-premise infrastructure. “Office 365 allows us to transition to the cloud with no disruption to our services,” says Izaks. “This is very important because it means we can plan and deploy at our own pace. Employees only have to remember one password, and once logged on can access all the information they need from a SharePoint Online portal.”

HSH is also benefitting from Microsoft’s investments in reliability. “The kind of resilience on [Microsoft’s] infrastructure is not something a company can implement without heavy investment,” says Izaks. “Also, Microsoft offers a 24x7x365 support environment as part of the service”.  “Office 365 has helped us to save costs, improve communications and reduce support needs, contributing to enhanced productivity,” he concludes.

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