How Kempinski saved hundreds of thousands in licence fees by archiving

The Company

Kempinski is a luxury hotel management group celebrating its 125th anniversary this year. Steeped in history, the iconic company dates back to 1897, crowning them Europe’s oldest luxury hotel group.

A growing collection of distinguished properties proudly bears the Kempinski name. Their illustrious portfolio currently boasts 81 of the world’s most breathtaking destinations spread across 35 countries, each possessing their trademark exclusivity and European flair.

Kempinski’s prestigious heritage is equally matched by its ambitious vision for the future. And the group understands that embracing technology is the key to offering a world-class guest experience for another 125 years.

The evolution of the relationship

Kempinski has been a valued CloudM customer since 2010 when they used CloudM Migrate to transition from Novell GroupWise to Google Workspace.

Their relatively early adoption of Google Workspace shows their early commitment to cloud solutions: they could see the value on offer and understood the pivotal role the technology would play in the future.

Moving to the cloud enabled Kempinski to create a flexible, agile platform which allowed them to react to market opportunities faster than their peers and capitalize on innovation opportunities as they’ve presented themselves.

CloudM has played a central role in Kempinski’s tech stack ever since. Kempinski benefits from the CloudM Automate features with our Staff Directory being at the heart of their staff collaboration.

CTS, our partner and sister company (as part of the CTS Group), manages the Onboarding and Offboarding Workflow features on Kempinski’s behalf, setting up automation that work behind the scenes to streamline Kempinski’s day-to-day operations.CloudM’s automated onboarding solutions help new employees integrate seamlessly into the company.

New employees are granted immediate access to the resources they need for their role, including shared documents and calendars.

From company policy and culture training, to team introductions and job benefits, everything is accessible from day one, making new employees’ experience as straightforward and stress-free as possible.

At the opposite end of the employee journey, CloudM’s Offboarding Workflow feature automates Kempinski’s offboarding process, revoking passwords and permissions for employees the moment they leave the company.

Both of these features free up untold labor hours that would otherwise be spent manually onboarding and offboarding members of staff.

Holly Simpson, the Account Manager for Kempinski at CTS, recognises the values of CloudM’s features. She said: “Our fruitful relationship with Kempinski stretches back over a decade now. And only grows stronger with each passing year. The CloudM features form an integral part of the efficient, automated, managed service that CTS delivers to keep the hotels running day-to-day.”

Shaping CloudM’s Archive solution

Kempinski’s more recent uptake of the CloudM Archive module shows a continuing confidence in CloudM (and CTS) to sit at the center of their digital operations.When Google replaced their free Vault Former Employee (VFE) licenses with paid Archive User (AU) licenses, at a cost of ~€50 each per year, Kempinski was potentially looking at an eye-watering bill in the hundreds of thousands.

So they turned to CloudM for help.CloudM rose to the challenge, providing a managed migration of thousands of Kempinski’s archived profiles to cloud storage quickly and automatically, using CloudM Migrate. This slashed their expected expenditure drastically while keeping their offboarded user data secure, easily accessible and compliant.

We used CloudM Migrate to perform this initial transfer because it was the fastest way to move the data. Then, we added the Archive step to Kempinski’s offboarding policies so anyone offboarded in the future would automatically have their data archived to the same storage bucket (or another of their choice).

Archived data can be retrieved in just a couple of clicks and data is automatically purged forever after a set length of time to keep businesses compliant.

“We’re proud to have embraced CloudM solutions for over a decade now. And we believe they are providing solutions geared for the future. They’re an essential part of our strategy going forward.”

Riko Van Santen, Chief Information Officer for Kempinski Hotels

Here’s to the future

CloudM simply wouldn’t exist without collaboration with our customers. We’ve consistently grown out of our customers’ requests, needs and feedback.

“Kempinski has been a partner in the truest sense of the word,” says Gary Bennion, CloudM’s Chief Technology and Customer Officer. “They have collaborated closely with us for years to help shape CloudM and they continue to be a key customer.”

We’re currently working with Kempinski to centralize and manage their staff user data across HR, SSO (via a third party application), Google Workspace, People Application, and CloudM. This will undoubtedly further strengthen our relationship and may even lead to the creation of new products.

Our symbiotic relationship with Kempinski has enabled both of us to achieve greater success, and our ongoing dialogue fosters continuous growth and innovation.

So, as Kempinski raises a glass and reflects on 125 years of excellence, CloudM looks forward to supporting their future success.

Want to benefit from the same features that Kempinski, and other industry leading companies such as Spotify, Netflix and Uber, use?

With over 35,000 customers worldwide, CloudM’s user management features have helped companies put office life on auto-pilot by automating time-consuming tasks, allowing them to focus on the big picture, eradicate human error and save both time and money.

For more information on our platform, request a free 15 minute demo call with one of our team.