Here’s how some organisations are leveraging technology to deliver new services and ensure their IT infrastructure can support business needs in a flexible and agile manner.
Grace Baptist Church delivers high-quality online services with Canon
Like other places of worship, the Grace Baptist Church had to offer online services for its congregation during the Covid-19 lockdowns in Singapore.
It took some effort to produce those online services. Recordings were done with makeshift set-ups from various homes and stitched in post-production before they premiered on YouTube every week.
Even as on-site productions were finally allowed as the Covid-19 restrictions loosened, the quality of the recordings was not satisfactory as the church relied on its existing CCTV cameras to double up as live-streaming devices, and the desired level of engagement was missing.
To continue offering live streams of its on-site services post-Covid, the church decided to deploy the Canon Remote PTZ Camera System. “We wanted a camera that could produce high-quality videos to provide our congregation with a better viewing experience when joining us via live streams,” says Eugene Low, deacon of the AV Ministry for Grace Baptist Church.
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He continues: “We also needed something easy to use with minimal manpower required to lessen the burden on our audio-video [AV] team. The Canon Remote PTZ Camera System is a great fit for us as it can deliver high-quality videos, allows us to easily control all our cameras via a single console, and is cost-effective.”
Thanks to the upgrade, Grace Baptist Church’s content is now more accessible to its congregation. Members unable to attend worship services in person due to mobility or health concerns can stay connected to the church community via the live streams.
“We also get a good amount of viewership coming from outside Singapore, which is encouraging, and increasingly we are receiving walk-ins to our church from people who found us online,” says Low.
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He adds that the church’s live-streaming capability enables more participants to participate in celebratory events, such as weddings and baptisms, ensuring loved ones can always be part of the occasion.
The church plans to upgrade its AV infrastructure to handle 4K live-streaming videos and upskill its AV operators to enhance future virtual sessions for its congregation.
Alibaba Cloud helps Tiger Brokers to offer more reliable and secure services
Online brokerage firm Tiger Brokers is leveraging Alibaba Cloud to enhance its operations and strengthen the security of its IT infrastructure.
The firm has implemented Alibaba Cloud’s Global Accelerator (GA), Network Address Translation (NAT) Gateway and Elastic IP Address to improve network performance.
GA provides a network acceleration service for Internet-facing applications globally. It monitors applications and automatically schedules user traffic to ensure service continuity. The NAT Gateway solution offers a throughput capacity of up to 10 Gbit/s and supports cross-zone disaster recovery, guaranteeing a very high level of availability.
At the database layer, Tiger Brokers relies on Alibaba Cloud’s ApsaraDB for Relational Database Service, coupled with ApsaraDB for Redis for stability, reliability, scalability and high availability. This allows Tiger Brokers’ IT team to quickly build a highly secure, high-performance database.
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Besides supporting a hybrid of memory and hard disk data persistence, ApsaraDB for Redis can scale to meet high-performance, and low-latency read/ write operational requirements.
Tiger Brokers also uses Alibaba Cloud’s Log Service product to collect, ship, search, and analyse log data. Users can complete data collection from more than 30 data sources within five minutes. The solution also provides the online brokerage firm with valuable data insights to facilitate better decision-making and planning.
Additionally, Alibaba Cloud’s Bastion host and Resource Access Management (RAM) solutions were deployed to manage access to Tiger Broker’s valuable resources and data.
Bastionhost is an operation, maintenance, and security audit platform supporting a wide range of features, including two-factor security authentications, access control, and account and permission management.
Meanwhile, RAM is an identity and access control service that facilitates users’ access to resources through permission levels.
“As a broking service, network availability, performance, and protection from cyberattacks are critical to our peace of mind. Alibaba Cloud is the right partner as it has provided security to us at every level,” says Kelvin Liu, vice president of engineering at UP Fintech, commonly known as Tiger Brokers in Asia.
MyRepublic Digital turns to Boomi to accelerate digital transformation
MyRepublic Digital, the digital transformation company powering MyRepublic, has implemented the Boomi AtomSphere Platform to improve the efficiency and performance of its Encore platform.
As the digital engine behind a telecom operator’s business support systems, operations support systems, and customer experiences, MyRepublic Digital’s Encore platform manages many live processes across order fulfilment, billing, service assurance, mobile apps and chatbots.
With Boomi’s low-code integration solution, MyRepublic Digital has successfully performed automation enhancements to its Encore platform and enabled reusable configuration for integration with third-party vendors and partner payment gateways.
This has helped the company to simplify its digital ecosystem through Boomi’s vast selection of technology and application connectors.
“With Boomi, we’ve been able to expand the scope of our automation and increase Encore’s end-to-end order processing efficiency, which ultimately helps us deliver the frictionless experience customers expect from digital brands. For instance, we’ve observed a marked reduction in the customer waiting time for modems between one and two business days, allowing us to provide faster service,” says Gary Liew, managing director for Platform at MyRepublic Digital.
He continues: “We also appreciate how the Boomi AtomSphere Platform kept the customisation of interfaces at a minimum, which accelerated the integration process. Scalability, flexibility, and simplification to accelerate transformation are principles that we and Boomi share, and our success together has allowed us to explore new facets of what we can deliver better.”
