Technology

Role: Chief Technology Officer

Pre-MBO Legacy Environment

• Inherited hybrid IT landscape with limited visibility, shared services, and vendor lock-in.
• No formal security framework—exposing the business to compliance and continuity risks.
• Manually managed infrastructure with high operational overhead and zero audit readiness.
• Systems were tightly integrated with the parent company’s infrastructure, lacking autonomy.

Phase 1: Lift-and-Shift for Business Continuity

• Planned and executed a full lift-and-shift migration immediately after the MBO to minimise disruption.
• Decoupled legacy systems and deployed core services to Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365.
• Enabled secure email, file collaboration, and identity management via M365 E5 stack.
• Established disaster recovery, backups, endpoint control, and network segmentation baselines.

Phase 2: Cloud Modernisation & Compliance

• Redesigned architecture for scalability and zero-trust enforcement—achieving 100% cloud adoption.
• Implemented RBAC, Conditional Access, MFA, and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint organisation-wide.
• Delivered a fully operational ISMS aligned with ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 in under 12 months.
• Established vendor risk management, third-party onboarding frameworks, and secure DevOps workflows.
• Aligned systems with PDPA and data governance best practices—covering consent, retention, and breach response.

Outcomes & Business Impact

• Achieved ISO 27001 & 27701 certifications—paving the way for enterprise deal acceleration.
• Zero audit findings from external assessors, improved cyber posture and auditability.
• Replaced legacy systems and tools, reducing infrastructure costs and support overhead by 40%.
• Strengthened trust with customers, partners, and regulators post-MBO through transparency and compliance.
• Transformed IT from an inherited liability into a business-aligned, secure, cloud-native foundation.

Tech Stack & Tools:
Microsoft Azure · Microsoft 365 · Azure AD · Conditional Access · Kaspersky Endpoint · Intune · Azure DevOps · VPN (S2S/P2S) · Bitwarden · SSO/IDP · ISO 27001 / 27701 · PDPA

Role: Chief Technology Officer

Programme Objective

• Strengthen the organisation’s security and privacy posture to support enterprise deal flow and regulatory requirements.
• Establish audit-ready, continuous security operations aligned with ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 standards.

Approach

• Designed and implemented a full-stack observability framework, integrating SIEM, APM, and distributed tracing tools.
• Deployed anomaly detection and alerting capabilities across multi-region Azure environments to improve response time and incident traceability.
• Introduced CI/CD pipelines with security automation and DevSecOps policies embedded into the development lifecycle.
• Mapped technical controls to ISO 27001/27701 clauses and supported policy implementation across infrastructure, applications, and vendor access.

Outcomes & Business Impact

• Achieved ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 certifications, enabling business expansion into highly regulated industries and public sector tenders.
• Reduced incident detection and resolution time with integrated observability and proactive anomaly alerts.
• Improved audit readiness, access governance, and traceability across all cloud workloads.
• Embedded security culture and automation across engineering and operations teams.

Tech Stack & Tools:
Microsoft Azure · Azure Monitor · Application Insights · Azure Sentinel · Log Analytics · Azure Pipelines · Azure DevOps · ISO 27001 / 27701 · OneTrust · SSO / IDP Integration · CI/CD · DevSecOps

Role: Chief Technology Officer

Problem Statement

• Loyalty programs were fragmented, lacked real-time engagement, and were disconnected from digital payments.
• Client required a unified solution to manage loyalty rewards, enable seamless payments, and provide localised support across 10 countries.

Solution Overview

• Designed and delivered a cloud-native SuperApp integrating B2B loyalty, digital wallet, QR redemption, and KYC capabilities.
• Supported real-time transaction processing, localised content in 23 languages including RTL (right-to-left), and multi-currency rewards.
• Replatformed legacy systems from .NET Framework to .NET Core, achieving 40% performance improvement.
• Integrated third-party fintech APIs for payment processing, onboarding, and merchant reconciliation.

Outcomes & Business Impact

• Enabled merchants and distributors to offer real-time redemptions, increasing engagement and transaction volume.
• Reduced operational cost with self-service onboarding, configurable campaign engines, and real-time dashboards.
• Deployed successfully across 10 countries with multi-tenant scalability and strong localisation support.

Tech Stack & Tools:
.NET Framework · Swift · Kotlin · Azure App Services · Redis · SQL Server · Azure Functions · KYC Integration · QR APIs · CDN ·OKTA · SignalR · OpenAPI · Swagger · REST · Wallet Intgration · Open Banking API

Role: Chief Technology Officer

Challenges

• Disparate service management practices across regions causing inconsistent support quality.
• No unified service desk or central metrics to track SLAs and incidents.

Approach

• Established ITIL 4–aligned service processes across incident, change, and problem management.
• Rolled out a centralised service desk platform with role-based workflows and integrated knowledge base.
• Created KPIs and automated reporting for MTTR, SLA adherence, and service availability.

Outcomes

• Achieved 35% reduction in average incident resolution time.
• Improved user satisfaction scores and service transparency.
• Enabled regional alignment and cross-training of service staff for improved coverage.

Tech Stack & Tools:
Azure AD · Power BI · ITIL 4 · Jira · Confluence · Automation Workflows

Role: Chief Technology Officer

Challenges

• No documented BCP/DR strategy for critical applications and infrastructure.
• Lack of regular simulations or defined RTO/RPO across business units.

Approach

• Defined critical systems and developed tiered recovery plans by workload category.
• Implemented Azure Site Recovery, Geo-Redundant Storage, and automated snapshots.
• Ran semi-annual failover drills and incident tabletop exercises with business continuity teams.

Outcomes

• Improved RTO by 60% and RPO by 40% for mission-critical services.
• Increased business confidence in system resilience and compliance posture.
• Received positive audit ratings for disaster readiness and risk mitigation.

Tech Stack & Tools:
Microsoft Azure · Azure Site Recovery · GRS · Backup Vault · Microsoft 365 · BCP Playbooks

Role: Chief Technology Officer

Architecture Objectives

• Build a scalable multi-tenant loyalty engine supporting diverse industry verticals and partner models.
• Enable configurable reward logic, secure integrations, and real-time redemption.

Solution Overview

• Designed modular microservices in .NET Core with isolated domains for onboarding, points, campaigns, and payments.
• Implemented secure APIs (OpenAPI spec) and OAuth2.0-based authentication with granular RBAC.
• Enabled integrations with wallets, SMS, QR code redemptions, ERP connectors, and campaign engines.
• Established CI/CD, logging, tracing, and multi-tenant telemetry.

Outcomes & Impact

• Reduced merchant onboarding from weeks to days via admin self-serve flows and config layers.
• Processed millions of transactions per month across multiple geographies with 99.99% uptime.
• Enabled localised customisation without code changes, via metadata-driven architecture.

Tech Stack & Tools:
.NET Core · Azure App Services · SQL Server · Redis · Azure API Management · OpenAPI · OAuth2.0 · Azure DevOps · Azure Monitor · SignalR

Role: Chief Technology Officer

Initial Challenges

• Manual deployments and inconsistent build/test pipelines across projects.
• Lack of security guardrails, rollback strategies, or traceable deployments.

Approach

• Established CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions with environment-specific workflows.
• Adopted Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) using Bicep templates and Terraform for reproducible infra provisioning.
• Embedded quality and security gates including SAST, approval workflows, and automated testing stages.
• Containerised services using Docker and deployed to AKS and Azure App Services.

Outcomes

• Accelerated deployment velocity by over 60% with reduced manual errors.
• Improved release confidence and shortened incident recovery cycles.
• Enabled full audit trails for governance and compliance tracking.

Tech Stack & Tools:
Azure DevOps · GitHub Actions · Docker · ARM Templates · SonarQube · Postman · Jira · REST · YAML Pipelines

Role: Chief Technology Officer

Observability Goals

• Enable proactive incident detection and reduce MTTR across hybrid infrastructure.
• Unify logs, metrics, and traces under a single observability plane with real-time alerting.

Implementation

• Integrated APM, Log Analytics, and distributed tracing into cloud-native workloads.
• Set up anomaly detection, event correlation, and root cause prediction with machine learning models.
• Built dashboards and playbooks for automated remediation using Azure Logic Apps and scripting.

Outcomes

• Reduced MTTR by 50% through real-time visibility and alerting.
• Enabled self-healing workflows and intelligent escalation policies.
• Improved service reliability, SRE practices, and engineering efficiency.

Tech Stack & Tools:
Azure Monitor · Application Insights · Log Analytics · Grafana · Azure Logic Apps · Prometheus · Alertmanager · KQL · AIOps