Overview

The Ministry of Education is committed to bringing out the best in every child by providing a variety of learning opportunities, nurturing the whole child holistically. The broad-based education exposes each child to different possibilities and ensures a strong foundation for learning in a variety of domains.

MOE has created a variegated education landscape with diverse pathways, aimed at helping our children cultivate qualities such as creativity, confidence, compassion, and resilience – life skills essential in a rapidly changing world. They also learn values such as respect, responsibility, integrity, care, and harmony; all of which are important for safeguarding our cohesive and harmonious multi-racial and multi-cultural society.

The Challenge:

• PayNow is a funds transfer service that enables the customers of seven participating banks to send and receive Singapore Dollar funds from one bank to another in Singapore, using just their mobile number or NRIC/FIN, almost instantly.
• Agency decided to host with Azure as a cloud solution for secured and convenient access for all the stakeholders and disbursing community centers.

Our solution:

• Create Azure subscription under Southeast Asia Region (Singapore).
• Setup & configure both UAT and Production environment.
• Hardening at server level.
• Firewall configuration.
• Secured jump server setup to access the VMs.
• The webservers are configured under internal load balancer and configure with Sophos XG Firewall and web application firewall security policies.
• Created SQL Fail over cluster (Active-Passive) within the region under Sophos XG Firewall policies.
• Created Jump Server under the same region within the same network resource group.
• Open Jump Server RDP with DUO multifactor Authentication.

Our Results

The total solution built in 15 days and migrated the application to the UAT environment. Another 3 days to migrate from UAT to production including additional security & hardening exercise.

• Instant payment method to disburse award fund.
• High availability and redundancy.
• Seamless and faster access.
• Advanced security controls to ensure data protection.
• Cost-effectiveness.
• Digital transformation helped to improve the productivity and avoid manual processing of cheques.
• Traceability of information & Reporting.
• Visibility and audit trail on all process functions.
• Similar business-to-consumer digitalization initiatives working with the bank is possible.