Security and Productivity Fuel Digital Transformation

By Wilson Lee, Director of Information Technology, Kerry Logistics

Wilson Lee, Director of Information Technology, Kerry Logistics

In today’s fast-changing economy, mobility and efficient communication are crucial for businesses to excel in their field, especially for the logistics industry. Being a multinational corporation with more than 1,000 service points and over 25,000 employees in 51 countries and territories, Kerry Logistics faced the core challenge of sustaining a safe, centralized while user-friendly platform for employees to connect and collaborate at work.

Our digital transformation vision

The ever-growing business and expansions vastly increased IT burden in terms of budget and administrative work. However, with over 1,000 different-sized service locations across six continents, it was not feasible for us to invest into on-premise hardware and software with local vendors. With the aim to simplify our infrastructure with one platform for communication, cloud adoption was the starting point of our digital transformation journey by deploying Microsoft Office 365. This cloud-based service offers a one-stop solution of providing a highly mobile working environment for employees and expanding IT management with security and scalability within our MNC business model.

Confidential information on mobile devices

In cloud, data is secured and protected both in transit and at rest. We deploy Intune to assure full protection of confidential information in email correspondence and mobile devices management.

It provides us with the protection level that is not available from on-premise solutions.

Zero-Day attack protection

One of the key features of Office 365 is Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), a cloud-based email filtering service that helps with protecting our employees against unknown malware and viruses. ATP has rich reporting and URL trace capabilities that fully protect our Exchange Online cloud-hosted mailboxes and provide insights into the kind of attacks happening in our organization.

Preventive abnormal access pattern detection

In addition, Advanced Threat Analysis (ATA) enables us to detect abnormal patterns right away with built-in intelligence and behavioral analytics if our platform is hacked by a valid identity. This helps to reduce our risk of costly damage and gather all the information needed in a succinct, real-time view of the attack timeline. With the self-learning and ready-to-analyze intelligence, there is no need for us to monitor a flood of security reports anymore. With ATA, it allows our IT team to identify which suspicious activities should be prioritized for further investigation.

Cloud-based communication platform for all employees

In view of the rapid growth and expansion, rollout time and various aspects of entry barriers are crucial when we deploy a unified email platform across different entities. With cloud adoption, employees are empowered to communicate using a centralized cloud-based email platform with enhanced productivity and operational efficiency. They can easily install email platform and leverage Skype for business on their mobile devices for efficient communication in this highly mobile logistics industry. For instance, it used to take three to five days to set up email accounts, install software, and go through admin procedures for new employees, whereas now it only takes a few hours. Over time, that adds up to vast efficiencies and cost savings. Moreover, our employees can access customer information anytime, anywhere using different devices and platforms, enabling them to collaborate effectively with others through the auto-sync features.

Cloud-empowered digital transformation

With our rapid business growth, our adoption of cloud services has helped us to remain competitive within the logistics sector. So far, we experienced unprecedented scalability and flexibility, which reduced our need to invest into on-premise hardware, IT infrastructure, and manpower. Moving forward, we hope to extend the adoption of Office 365 cloud services to more frontline workers in different locations and facilitate collaboration among various functions as the next step in our digital transformation journey.