Swire Properties develops and manages commercial, retail, hotel, and residential properties, typically mixed-use developments in prime locations across Hong Kong, China Mainland, the US, and Southeast Asia.

The company adopts a creative mindset and a long-term business approach to explore new perspectives and uncover potential that others might miss. This requires innovative thinking to address today's challenges to create exceptional places, vibrant communities, and a sustainable future for everyone.

Swire Properties had significant business opportunities that demanded a more agile and expedited digital transformation. With a long history and operations across multiple locations, Swire Properties seeks to drive further synergy and scale through standardization.

The company’s diverse teams, including IT operations, development, business users, security, data teams, and external vendors, were facing challenges with data silos across different business units and shopping centers, hindering the potential value for the group. Additionally, the distributed nature of the data posed significant security risks and complicated efforts to achieve centralized data visualization.

To address these issues, Swire Properties prioritized enhancing IT robustness and security as the business evolved. The group also wanted to manage its user resources and data access rights and conduct thorough audits before, during, and after events. A comprehensive user management and data control plan was needed to protect critical information while enabling effective collaboration.

Maintaining a secure IT environment was paramount to navigating this landscape, enhancing efficiency, and delivering the security stakeholders expect.

Swire Properties was looking for a reliable and trusted cloud provider that would meet its needs for agility, scalability, stability, and security across its footprint, and Alibaba Cloud fulfilled these requirements.

Secondly, Swire Properties operates in dynamic and progressive markets with a strong focus on innovation. It regards Alibaba Cloud as a partner, not only in enabling it with the latest technologies but also in co-creating solutions to meet its business demands.

With Alibaba Cloud, Swire Properties can confidently deliver on its strategic priorities of driving digital transformation and strengthening IT by optimizing and transforming business processes, modernizing its tech stack, and shifting existing capabilities to the cloud.

Alibaba Cloud supported Swire Properties across various essential areas, including landing zone enhancements, security improvements, big data solutions, and serverless capabilities.

Landing Zone Enhancements
Alibaba Cloud enabled Swire's cloud-first strategy across Mainland China, significantly improving its IT operations. In addition to utilizing Alibaba Cloud's core capabilities and services, Swire Properties collaborated on enhancing landing zones, security, and serverless usability. This adaptation to its business and usage scenarios improved the overall experience and security. For example, streamlining the process of creating an Alibaba Cloud account with legal entity inheritance reduced the turnaround time from 3 days to only 5 minutes.

Security Improvements
Based on Alibaba Cloud's best practices and Cloud Adoption Framework, Swire Properties built a four-layer security protection architecture on the cloud. Bastionhost, Data Management (DMS), Identity as a Service (IDaaS), CloudSSO, and Resource Access Management (RAM) provided a secure access barrier. The Cloud Firewall provided network boundary control. The Security Center dynamically identifies and analyzes security threats in host and platform configuration. The DataWorks, SASE, and Key Management Service were leveraged to ensure the data security at rest and in transit.

Big Data Solutions
Swire Properties utilizes a range of Alibaba Cloud data analytics tools and services, such as MaxCompute, AnalyticDB for MySQL, and Quick BI, to tackle crucial challenges in its business operations. Through integrating various data sources across the organization, Swire Properties has established centralized data governance, and fortified security controls, and notably expedited its ETL and visualization processes—from days to hours or even in real-time. The breadth of Alibaba Cloud's data-driven capabilities empowers Swire Properties to uncover valuable insights, expedite decision-making, and address time-sensitive business requirements.

The partnership has achieved significant milestones together, and we believe that there is still more potential for collaborative achievement. For instance, we anticipate discovering additional opportunities and insights from the perspective of group data assets.