Benefit One Inc.

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ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer enables Benefit One Inc. to achieve 20% reduction in overall IT Spending

Customer Speaks

"When we have many event log numbers, it takes a while to find out which one needs emergency response. EventLog Analyzer displays everything in an easily viewable dashboard, including error warnings, so our response was streamlined including precautionary measures"
Satoshi Kinugawa
Senior Manager / Head of Infrastructure Team
System Development Division
Benefit One Inc.

The Customer

Benefit One Inc., a subsidiary of Pasona Group, is mainly engaged in the provision of agency business for welfare work of companies. The company was founded on March 15, 1996 and is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Benefit One Inc. operates members-only website, Benefit Station (https://bs.benefit-one.co.jp), which has made a leap in the field of family benefit outsourcing services. Through Benefit Station, they provide services such as travel, guesthouse, relaxation, and corporate outing package assistance for members, who include corporates as well individual clients.

The Challenges

• The main challenge for the Benefit One Infrastructure Team was to ensure stable, 24x7x365 round the year, uninterrupted availability of Benefit Station website (https://bs.benefit-one.co.jp). With a limited staff, it was becoming increasingly difficult to handle both system operations and maintenance. After a detailed system study, the team decided to automate their system resource monitoring and IT infrastructure maintenance by outsourcing their operations management.
• A year after outsourcing their operations, the team did a cost-benefit analysis and was unhappy with their findings. The cost of outsourcing was far more in comparison to the productivity benefits they had hoped to achieve. More than half of the cost was incurred on server log maintenance, and due to concerns of privacy and information security they couldn't completely outsource every aspect of their operations, hence complete automation couldn't be achieved.

"After review of our findings, we decided to take back control of our operations management, firstly focusing on cost reduction and then strengthening our systems for automation" said Satoshi Kinugawa, Senior Manager / Head of Infrastructure Team, System Development Division of Benefit One

The Solution

ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer
ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer
ManageEngine OpManager

Incidentally, during one of their earlier review process Kinugawa's operations team had considered the option of in-house operations management in addition to outsourcing, and they had then evaluated several network and security management products and were impressed by Zoho's 'ManageEngine OpManager' and 'ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer'.

"Currently our user environment has 600 workstations and 450 thin clients, our system environment has 160 physical servers and 230 logical servers, and 200 network devices," said Kinugawa. He judged that ManageEngine products could meet his requirements, and after a comprehensive evaluation the Benefit One Infrastructure Team eventually purchased three ManageEngine products - EventLog Analyzer, OpManager, and Firewall Analyzer.

EventLog Analyzer is web-based; real-time, agent-less (optional agents available) event log and application log monitoring and management software. This product can mitigate internal threats, conduct log forensics analysis, monitor privileged users and comply to different compliance regulatory bodies (PCI DSS , FISMA, GLBA, SOX, HIPAA etc.) by intelligently analyzing machine generated logs and instantly providing a variety of reports like user activity reports, regulatory compliance reports, historical trend reports, and more.

OpManager is a complete, end-to-end network monitoring software that offers customizable dashboards and advanced fault and performance management functionality across critical IT resources such as routers, WAN links, switches, firewalls, VoIP call paths, physical servers, virtual servers, domain controllers and other IT infrastructure devices.

Firewall Analyzer is agent-less log analytics and configuration management software for network security devices. The product is used for end-point security monitoring and analysis, change management, employee Internet monitoring, bandwidth monitoring, capacity planning, policy enforcement, and security and compliance audit reporting. Firewall Analyzer is vendor-agnostic and supports almost all open-source and commercial network firewalls, IDS/IPS, VPNs, proxies and related security devices.

The deployment was so simple that the team could get the ManageEngine products operational within a day, without seeking any assistance from Zoho Japan. "The server needed settings on SNMP and Syslog for network devices, yet all the work was completed as an extended part of our daily business operation." said Kinugawa.

Benefits

OpManager helped Benefit One to not only manage their physical servers but also their virtual servers, where the CPU utilization is displayed by the unit of virtual machine, which means complete detail of the system could be visualized.

Firewall Analyzer provided detailed reports on the unused firewall policies and helped the team to reconfigure their firewalls and strengthen their network security against threats.

EventLog Analyzer automated their entire log management process, drastically cut the effort and time required for managing their server logs and provided a huge cost advantage for Benefit One's IT operations. "When we have many event log numbers, it takes a while to find out which one needs emergency response. EventLog Analyzer displays everything in an easily viewable dashboard, including error warnings, so our response was streamlined including precautionary measures." (Kinugawa)

Annual IT Operations cost slashed by 1/5th

By switching to ManageEngine products, Benefit One could gain two major advantages.

The first advantage was cost reduction. "In comparison to annual outsourcing cost we paid before, introduction of ManageEngine products enabled us to slash the monitoring cost by 1/5th." said Kinugawa. OpManager's network monitoring capability was complemented by Firewall Analyzer's firewall log monitoring and EventLog Analyzer's integrated log management, which provided Kinugawa and his team a highly efficient network management and security monitoring experience at fraction of the outsourcing cost they had incurred earlier.

The second advantage is the excellent usability. The three products share similar design and all the information users want to know could be viewed in an integrated fashion, and in addition, the screen layout is designed for easy configuration, which helps gaining the whole picture with ease. The types of mail alert vary from something that needs emergency response to simply reporting stable operation. "I can tell which should be handled with higher priority immediately, so I can shorten the time from confirmation to coping. Besides, the help documents are very comprehensive. Even when I come up with something that I do not understand, help document provides answers to my questions immediately." (Kinugawa)