As senior manager for Global Infrastructure Operations at APL Logistics in Singapore, I am the lead for the infrastructure operations, which includes network, storage, backup, database, and mindware, reporting directly to the Global Infrastructure Director. This role is very different from anything I’ve ever done before. It has really broadened my horizon and elevated my perspective on IT operations. I get to stay in touch with different technology to design, propose and provide forecasting technologies for the company. I am given the autonomy and creative freedom to integrate different things coming from different domains.

Many companies hear about Cloud projects and simply think, “Okay, going cloud is the way to go, so we need to follow suit”. But we must move to the cloud in a smart way – by identifying the right processes and optimization of operations in order to fully enjoy the benefits. Right now, we’re moving away from the traditional legacy system into what we call a new, more open system. We must stay abreast of digitalization transformation. And we must push ourselves to go even further.

We are embarking on the journey of migrating from a physical machine to virtualization and working towards creating our own private cloud on-premises. With this, we can scale our system resource within a short period as well as reduce our data center footprint. We reduce a lot of things to help the company to bring down the cost. Of course, none of this would be possible without the strong support from my team.

Communication is key

My team came together and said, “Okay, if we were to go virtualization, what things do we need to consider, what things do we need to configure? Then, by doing that, would it be able to meet the business requirement in a way we want it to look?” We do all this assessment, present the proposal to management, then do all the testing.

We sometimes fail but we’ve always made it work. When we encounter challenges, this can create a lot of retakes. However, open communication is important in order to reduce this and make things run more smoothly to come up with a solution. We’ve been together through thick and thin, but we’ve always succeeded.

I remember last year, we were actually moving away from our previous company Neptune Orient Lines (NOL) and had to move its data center to our center. The apps team, infrastructure team, DBA, our system, our network, including CIO and everybody in IT, all banded together to literally help each other to succeed.

That was something I’ve never encountered before in my 20 years in the IT industry.

When everything and everyone else seemed to be against us, we proved that we could make it. Some of us didn’t sleep for about three days to make it work. I’m sure it’ll be difficult to find a stronger team elsewhere. This makes me proud and humbled.