How the Cloud Transformed a Traditional Post Officer for Digital Success
Find out more about how the cloud is driving the logistics and transport industry forward in our Global Industry Best Practices on Alibaba Cloud for Logistics and Transportation whitepaper.
Digitization is advancing across every market, transforming established organizations and providing businesses with new entry points into traditional markets.
Many logistics companies are turning to the cloud to provide these solutions thanks to their inherent scalability, cost-effectiveness and easy-of-use.
For example, our cloud-based solutions helped the logistics arm of the Alibaba Group, Cainiao, save 260 million hours a day in delivery time and meet the massive spikes in demand during the Double 11 Global Shopping Festival. Recently, we also helped a traditional post officer, SingPost, find digital success.
Introducing SingPost
In Singapore, residents rely on one provider to deliver their post, parcels and documents: the Singapore Post (SingPost). This established postal service has been up and running for more than 150 years, providing a lifeline for individuals and businesses, who have come to recognize the quality of its service.
SingPost came to Alibaba Cloud when it decided to enter the competitive e-commerce logistics market. SingPost wanted to target Singapore and another 19 markets, providing a range of mail and logistics solutions, from front-end web management to warehousing and fulfillment, last mile delivery and international freight forwarding.
We helped SingPost consolidate the majority of its cloud and on-premise servers onto the Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute service (ECS) platform, providing it with a cost-effective and scalable solution. These resources are used primarily for SingPost’s big data and AI workloads, playing a crucial role in smart last-mile fulfillment, while helping SingPost optimize its business.
ECS provides SingPost with an intuitive and cost-effective solution, where the company’s administrators can deploy new instances with just a few clicks. Plus, the business only pays for the resources it uses, reducing its operational and maintenance costs.
SingPost also prioritized its security and quality of service. ECS provides an industry-leading Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.975% availability for individual instances and 99.995% availability for multiple zones within the same region.
Data is also encrypted and secured in our Object Storage Service (OSS), providing SingPost with a high reliability, multiple access control measures and fine-grained authorization.
When it comes to file storage, SingPost uses NAS, which comes with standard file access protocols, so SingPost did not have to modify its existing applications. Plus, NAS provides SingPost with unlimited capacity and performance scaling, for high reliability and availability.
To further guarantee its performance during spikes in demand and minimize response times, we also deployed our Server Load Balancer (SLB). This distributes traffic across multiple instances, boosting SingPost’s application performance and availability, while eliminating single points of failures and improving fault tolerance across its applications.
To summarize, our cloud-based solutions provide SingPost with a highly cost-effective, reliable and secure set of solutions, expediting its digital transformation and helping it make data-driven decisions.
“The key reasons behind this strategic partnership are the broader Alibaba ecosystem, its proven technologies, deep understanding of the logistics industry, and their can-do attitude,” says Alex Tan, chief information officer, SingPost.
Industry Best Practices on Alibaba Cloud
Alibaba Cloud is a world-class cloud provider with extensive experience in the logistics and transportation industry. To find out more about our work with SingPost and others, download our Global Industry Best Practices on Alibaba Cloud for Logistics and Transportation whitepaper.
