Rotana Hotel Management

At A Glance

• Rotana currently manages a portfolio of over 100 properties throughout the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Turkey

Customer Vision

When Biju Dharmaraj joined UAE-based Rotana Hotel Management Corporation as Director of IT Security and Infrastructure, he was concerned about the company’s email security. “We were using an MSP for email security and the solution was very basic. It was the first thing I tried to change when I came on board,” he says.

Unfortunately, due to contractual obligations, changing email security providers was not possible at the time, so Dharmaraj had to make do with what he had. “Spam was a nightmare,” he recalls, “We had a lot of false positives and false negatives. People weren’t getting important emails, and we had to call the MSP every time we wanted to make changes.”

Ironically, his world changed in 2018 when the company was targeted by a major phishing campaign. “Luckily, we weren’t breached –but it was a wakeup call for us. The news of ransomware attacks was also increasing at that time, so management was on board with changing providers. Our existing contract had expired during this time which helped us to make the decision”

“Our Mimecast engineer was great – he educated us on the platform so we could customize things to our operation. From there it was really easy to configure the system.”

Biju Dharmaraj - Director of IT Security and Infrastructure, Rotana Hotel Management Corporation

Customer Strategy

Even though Dharmaraj could not change email security providers immediately when he joined the company, he went ahead and evaluated solutions so he’d be ready to move once management was amenable to a change. “We looked at a lot of vendors and Mimecast was at the top of our list” he says. “The market feedback was very positive, and when we looked at the management console and saw how easy it was to operate, Mimecast became our top choice.”

Dharmaraj needed to be confident in his decision, because the new system would impact 4,500 end users who are prone to being change-resistant. “Any change is challenging in the hospitality sector, because people are used to custom-designed applications where product cycles are measured in years, not months,” he says. “So, this was a big change for them.”

Customer Outcome

Dharmaraj was able to implement the change very quickly, thanks to the Mimecast support team. Mimecast Email Security was up and running in one week, and the system was fully tuned within a month, giving the company new-found protection against ransomware and targeted attacks. “We decided not to take any configuration from the existing system and start from scratch” he says. “Our Mimecast engineer was great – he educated us on the platform so we could customise things to our operation. From there, it was really easy to configure the system.”

Mimecast has ended the torrent of false negatives and false positives that caused missed business opportunities and cluttered inboxes with the old system. Additionally, employees can now manage their Mimecast settings right in Outlook, rather than having to log into a separate portal.

And, what about those change-resistant end users? “They’re really happy – particularly with the Outlook plugin. That’s made life a lot easier for them,” Dharmaraj says. “And for us, we spent way more time calling support for our old system, which didn’t work well at all, compared to now with Mimecast, which works great!”