Unicharm Corporation, established in 1961, has its head office in Tokyo, Japan and is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of household consumer products. The company has almost 7,000 employees worldwide, and annual sales of 3.9 billion dollars. Unicharm’s products include baby and child care products, feminine care products, health care products, cosmetic products, household products, industrial materials, food-packaging materials and more.
Challenge
With the rapid growth of its global business, Unicharm was looking to unify various inconsistent company systems, reduce the cost of system expansion and reduce the workload related to e-mail management. For this purpose, Unicharm entrusted ISR to provide a solution to deploy Google Apps for 3,500 users.
Solution
First, ISR helped Unicharm determine the specifications for a highly secure system that could be easily managed and that would meet their requirements. These requirements included account management, security policy, and address book for the entire system. It was decided to,
- Unify the domain and mail system for the entire company.
- Implement a shared Address book.
- Restrict external access for increased security.
- Establish a security policy that determines password strength and password expiration for users.
- Generate a log to record who accesses the system, when, and where.
Based on these requirements, ISR provided a solution comprising Google Apps Premier Edition, CloudGate SSO and CloudGate Address Book.
ISR set up Google Apps Premier Edition accounts for Unicharm’s users and deployed the CloudGate single sign-on system with customized functions. A special version of the CloudGate Address Book was developed to fulfill the shared address book requirement with LDAP integration so that employee address book information would be updated automatically and seamlessly.
Results
Thanks to the ISR solution, today more than 3,500 Unicharm users can access all of their web applications securely and reliably. Administration costs are significantly lower, and expansion of the system for new business units can now be made easily and effortlessly.
