How cloud solutions unlocked new growth opportunities for e-commerce company QNET

Earlier this year, QNET, a prominent Asian direct selling company with a global customer base and one of the earliest in the direct selling industry to go online in 1998, detected suspicious behaviour from the account of one of its distributors. A hacker was lurking and trying to evade detection by repeatedly attempting to log into QNET's applications every few hours.

While some businesses would have taken months to discover this breach, it took only a matter of days for QNET. The firm immediately secured the account with Microsoft Azure Sentinel, a cloud-native security incident and event management solution. Through advanced artificial intelligence and security analytics, Sentinel recognised the hacker's behaviour and blocked it.

On another occasion, Sentinel identified malware that had slipped into QNET's anti-virus programme.

Being so proactive was unimaginable just two years ago, when QNET was dealing with an on-premise IT infrastructure that failed to cope with security and business demands.

"We were so stressed," says Mr Ked Mardemootoo, cloud infrastructure manager at QNET. "The team was always fire-fighting and fixing things that just kept breaking."

Old IT systems hampered business growth

QNET started in the Philippines in 1998 as an e-commerce platform with two products. Twenty-three years later, its business has spread across Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe, with a broad range of products that include health, wellness, travel and education.

Although QNET has incorporated innovation into its approach to business since the beginning, for the first two decades, its technology platforms were built in a reactive way – only when the need arose. The mishmash of IT platforms and innumerable vendors was time-consuming and not efficient. This was especially so in 2019, when legacy IT systems and processes caused multiple downtimes, which meant significant revenue losses.

"With a slow website, customers got frustrated and left without an explanation," says Mr Mardemootoo. In fact, without users' feedback, the IT team might never have known about the issue.

“QNET relies on technology for its business, but technology ended up becoming a limiting factor instead. We couldn’t support new market expansion from a technology point of view quickly enough."

New ways of doing things

The team realised they needed to overhaul the firm’s IT infrastructure and find a solution that provided flexibility and agility.

"QNET wanted more than a ‘lift and shift’ approach, replicating the current set-up in the cloud, as suggested by traditional system integrators," says Mr Mardemootoo. "We wanted to evaluate every aspect and leverage cloud technology to improve processes."

A long-time Microsoft customer, QNET’s IT team laid out a staggered transition. First, it adopted a hybrid cloud model as part of its cloud migration journey, migrating the front end and carefully assessing the impact. Then, it completed its migration to 100 per cent cloud on Microsoft Azure in April this year. This approach gave the team time to get used to the infrastructure and paradigm shift, upskill capabilities and fully understand the impact of such a move.

"At QNET, we believe strongly in enabling and developing our own people. We invested in Azure and in training our own staff to achieve remarkable results. The morale and the energy of the team is now completely transformed. They are motivated and raring to try new things! " says Mr Ivan Woo, chief information officer at QNET.

Mr Woo’s motto is "People, Processes, and Technology" – in that order. "Young talent drove this transformation. Ked, who is 30 years old, spearheaded the modernisation of our infrastructure out of Singapore, while another 30-year-old, Ms Grace Manalo, is leading the transformation from the Philippines. Our teams in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand also played a key role, and I couldn’t be prouder of how well they all worked together seamlessly, transforming and growing themselves in the process," says Mr Woo.

Speeding up business agility

QNET benefited immediately: IT was able to respond to business changes quickly. In the past, procuring servers to build a new application would have taken months. Now, they are procured and provisioned in the cloud in days. Scaling up to enter new markets or launching new features is faster than before, and customers are feeling the benefits.

"In a month, we completed an entire database upgrade, which would have taken longer and been a lot more stressful before," says Mr Mardemootoo. "In the cloud, the migration needed fewer resources, cooperation was easier, and the global teams from Germany to India were able to test through multiple scenarios rapidly to identify the best path."

Being on the cloud also means QNET can tap Azure's other cloud-based solutions, such as Sentinel – which caught the security breach. The company has used these out-of-the-box tools to enhance efficiency, analyse customer behaviour on the website, and cope with challenges brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic.

For example, when the pandemic struck and lockdowns were enforced, QNET moved more than 1,000 employees across eight countries to work from home within 72 hours, and enabled secure remote work where needed via scalable Azure Virtual Desktop. With the previous Infrastructure, QNET could have handled only 100 people working remotely, which would have resulted in considerable impact on business continuity.

Endless possibilities with cost savings

Beyond just tech, Azure has helped QNET reduce operating expenses.

In the past, the company relied on two outsourced operations centres, monitoring only 20 per cent of its network and security accesses. Today, costs are reduced by 65 per cent, and infrastructure is fully monitored by collecting logs in Azure and automating workflow with Azure Logic apps. Additionally, the Azure Security Centre lets the firm measure its security via a Secure Score and answer the Board of Directors’ question: How secure are we?

Last but not least, communication networking costs decreased by 96 per cent after switching from a virtual private network (VPN) to Azure Virtual WAN, empowering collaboration across international teams in a more cost-effective way. More importantly, QNET can on-board a new country in only 10 minutes, instead of one to two months.

Cloud migration completed, the IT team is excited to experiment with new solutions that can give QNET the edge.

"Azure provides us with the flexibility, scalability and agility to try out new ideas without worrying about breaking IT systems or disrupting business operations," says Mr Mardemootoo. "Our energies can then focus on supporting and developing business, and anticipating the trends."