Hotel Nikko SF Uses Secure Web Gateway

Hotel Nikko offers 532 guest rooms for business and leisure travelers. Luxury hotel located in San Francisco’s Union Square offers rich amenities, including an expansive heated indoor pool, meeting and event space, an elegant restaurant and 24-hour fitness center. For over 25 years, Hotel Nikko has hosted weddings, galas, major fundraisers and other special events. Hotel Nikko received the prestigious Four Diamond Award from AAA and a four star rating in the 2013 Forbes Travel Guide.

One of San Francisco’s premier hotels, Hotel Nikko prides itself on its exceptional service, appealing amenities, and comfortable guest rooms. Located in historic Union Square, the hotel offers 532 guest rooms for business and holiday travelers. Like most hotels, Hotel Nikko relies on its network to support guest services, reservation systems, property management, and other critical business operations. Keeping the network safe and secure is key, and even a brief outage means lost revenue, disappointed guests and damage to the hotel’s reputation.

“Our goal is to provide the best possible service to everyone, from guests to employees. You can’t provide superior service without investing in superior solutions,” says Manuel Ruiz, Director of IT, Hotel Nikko.

Although Hotel Nikko had a firewall in place from another vendor, the device was difficult to manage and provided only limited protection against today’s sophisticated network threats. When a virus invaded the hotel’s network and impacted some of its most critical business systems, Ruiz and his team knew that they needed more complete security.

“If any of our network systems go down, it’s chaos — and big time revenue losses,” says Ruiz. “People don’t want to wait for you to fix your network so they can make a reservation. We had to protect our brand and meet our customer expectations.”

Hotel Nikko was seeking a complete security solution that would identify and mitigate the latest online threats — all in a single solution that was easy for its IT team to set up and use.

The Check Point Solution

Following a colleague’s recommendation, Ruiz installed and evaluated a Check Point 4200 Appliance to gain better visibility into the state of the network. “The management console gave us a level of visibility that we had never had before,” says Ruiz. “It was like someone turning on a light in a dark room. You don’t realize what’s really happening on your network unless you have that kind of visibility.”

Working closely with technology partner Dataway, Ruiz deployed a Check Point Secure Web Gateway Blade Solution. This comprehensive security solution gives the hotel real-time, multi-layered protection against web-borne malware, plus advanced granular control and intuitive, centralized management. Dataway helped the hotel define and implement the policies it needed, and fine-tuned the services for the best combination of performance and security.

Real-Time, Multi-Layered Protection

The Check Point Secure Web Gateway goes well beyond Hotel Nikko’s legacy security device to provide next-generation protection. A full array of Check Point Software Blades provide protection against viruses, bots, malicious web content and other external and internal security issues.

“Our previous device was basically just a firewall,” says Ruiz. “With Check Point, we can take advantage of all kinds of filtering for all layers. Using the different software blades, the protection is virtually unlimited. And our clustered environment gives us complete business continuity, so the network is never down.”

Simple, Complete Security Management

With the Check Point solution, Hotel Nikko can gain deep insight into all network activity with a single, easy-to-use dashboard interface. Instead of spending time tracking down network issues, Ruiz and his team can focus on improving performance and delivering a better experience for guests and employees.

“The dashboard is very intuitive, and really saves us time,” says Ruiz. “I can go to the application filtering window and it will show me right away if we have any network issues. I can do the same thing with DLP, IPS, and threat prevention.”

Flexible Solution That’s Built for Growth

The threat landscape is constantly changing, and Hotel Nikko wanted a solution that could evolve and grow when new challenges emerged. With Check Point’s extensible Software Blade architecture, the hotel can expand its security services whenever it’s ready — without purchasing expensive new hardware or making management more complex.

“The Check Point Software Blade architecture lets me consolidate multiple disparate systems on a single platform that’s easy to scale when our needs change,” says Ruiz. “It’s much easier than going through multiple vendors and purchasing, deploying, and configuring different devices.”

Advanced threat prevention cost-effectively replaces separate products

• DLP Software Blade helps prevent internal data breaches
• IPS, Anti-Bot, and Antivirus Software Blades provide up-to-date security against external threats
• URL Filtering Software Blade provides protection against web-based threats and content

Intuitive dashboard delivers visibility and manageability

• Single pane of glass provides complete insight into the entire state of the network
• Reporting and logging helps administrators examine historical network data
• Easy-to-use tools help small IT team to be more productive

Flexible solution can grow and evolve to support new applications

• Software Blade architecture can scale easily when new features are needed
• Agile architecture can quickly expand services without adding management complexity