CUSTOMER CASE STUDYSingapore media company
modernizes its cloud operating
model
A Singapore media company accelerates its cloud-first digitaltransformation and modernizes its approach to infrastructure bystandardizing on the HashiCorp Cloud Platform.

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY | SPH MEDIA

About SPH MediaSPH Media is a leading media group, with operations in the publishing of newspapers, magazines, andbooks in both print and digital editions. It also owns and operates other businesses such as radio stations
and outdoor media. The mission of SPH Media is to be the trusted source of news on Singapore and Asia,
to represent the communities that make up Singapore, and to connect them to the world.

20-person cloud platform teamsupporting 200 developers using
HashiCorp Cloud Platform

Cut application deployment time from 3
months to 2 weeks

95% fewer misconfigurations throughshift-left approach and drift detection~30M cross-platform views per day for SPH
Media properties

100% on Terraform for all things
infrastructure related, published
17+ modules for the open-source
community

Standardized governance anddevelopment best practices acrosshundreds of AWS accounts

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY | SPH MEDIA

close partnership has even enabled folks who have never“ Thisdone automation before to get started quickly on Terraformcompared to other platforms.
YONG WEN CHUAHEAD OF PLATFORM ENGINEERING

Moves towards modernization
SPH Media, a media group in Singapore, wanted to modernize its operations and demonstrate to customers
and potential employees its position as a cutting-edge company.
The company planned to move its website and application technology stacks to the cloud. SPH Media’sengineering team hoped the modernization would help the company automate its cloud and on-premises
infrastructure, which included AWS resource creation and management. Developers should be able to freely
use infrastructure resources without using AWS’s proprietary user interface or waiting for manual provisioning.
Modernizing also meant automating SPH Media’s API use. By leveraging APIs, the team could automate how
engineers used AWS and other services. This way, the team would be able to reuse and reproduce any service
it required, including code reviews and tracking changes on GitHub.

Standardization drives transformation
Modernizing the SPH Media cloud estate started with house-keeping, and investing in technical debt. The
engineering team faced an intricate web of virtual private clouds (VPCs), where VPCs are connected to one
another, as well as an on-premises data center, via Direct Connect and transit gateways.
As a consequence of this massive and deeply interconnected network, SPH Media’s cloud estate offered low
visibility into the network traffic, and had started to suffer from IP address starvation.
The architecture was not ideal and required improved security safeguards and consistent, dynamic credentialmanagement. It had been determined that standardized tools across all teams would make it easier forengineers to quickly find and resolve incidents.
Beyond its technical infrastructure, SPH Media also needed to attract suitable engineering talents. Finding asolution to these issues would be key to a successful modernization.

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY | SPH MEDIA

Challenges
Accelerating digital initiatives by creating new mobile apps, transforming andmodernizing old ones

Implementing standardized developer tools to retain talent, train developers andstreamline access so that developers could get up and running quickly
Improving efficiency, speed, governance, and compliance across infrastructure
automation

Advancing the use of dynamic credentials for applications and services, such as
databases, in order to further reduce security risks
Transforming the brand image of a print-first media company to a digital-first
media company to attract technical talents

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY | SPH MEDIACloud platform team paves way for federation, automation
To overcome these hurdles, SPH Media had formed a unified cloud platform team for individuals focused on
cloud governance and infrastructure deployment. It had also provided a coordinated workstream that instilled
better communication and knowledge-sharing between stakeholders involved in modernizing SPH Media’s
infrastructure and applications.
Instead of gatekeeping cloud resources, the platform team focused on enablement of application teams. With
this shift in mindset, the cloud became a self-service resource federated out to SPH Media’s engineers, rather
than something controlled by IT. The platform team also set up guardrails and policies for secure cloud use,completely changing the security paradigm by lifting the burden from individual developers.
“As you create a decentralized, self-service model, you want to make sure you have a very strong team to trainothers within the organization,” says Yong Wen, head of platform engineering. “This led to the formation of thecloud platform team where members of the team are experts on cloud infrastructure and can create vetted
modules that the application developers are encouraged to use and adopt.”
SPH Media’s cloud platform team purchased the HashiCorp Cloud suite on the HashiCorp Cloud Platform,
including Terraform, Packer, Vault, Consul, and Boundary, providing a flexible and accelerated path to using andderiving value from HashiCorp solutions.
The mindset shifts, new cloud platform team, and HashiCorp tooling ultimately allowed SPH Media’sdevelopers to get applications and services up and running smoothly and more quickly than ever.

HashiCorp Cloud Platform standardizes the cloud
operating modelStandardizing on HashiCorp products have provided standardized, automated workflows with security andcompliance to speed up development and digital initiatives. HashiCorp solutions architects advised SPH Media
during their journey as the team redesigned the AWS cloud estate.
HashiCorp’s suite of tools allowed SPH Media to create new isolated virtual private clouds not connected byAWS transit gateways. A service mesh built with the new Consul DataPlane feature provided transparency,fewer potentially overlapping IP addresses and gave SPH Media better control over network traffic. Terraform
automated provisioning while Sentinel’s policies as code allowed IT admins to keep control over workflows.

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY | SPH MEDIA

Vault provided dynamic credentials management for applications to improve the company’s security posture.
The cloud platform team is also exploring Boundary as an avenue for providing human access to internal
services in the future.
Standardizing on HashiCorp, automating, and federating resource deployment has also:•Given developer teams the freedom to get started on Day 1 faster, rather than spending time procuring theservices they need to use.

•

Helped SPH Media operationalize cloud estates, with operations, security, and networking teams adopting
a common infrastructure foundation.

•

Provided better security visibility, so the platform team can more easily figure out where things went wrong
when issues arise.

•Enabled a programmatic way to provide identity access and prevent credential theft while establishing azero-trust environment in the cloud.

As SPH Media implemented HashiCorp tools, HashiCorp’s account team had organized Terraform training
workshops, answered questions from SPH Media’s engineering team and provided access to specialists andthe HashiCorp product team.
“The collaboration process was eye-opening and by working closely with HashiCorp especially in advance
testing and implementation of new product features, we could ensure that our modernization process wentwell,” said Yong Wen. “This close partnership has even enabled folks who have never done automation before to
get started quickly on Terraform compared to other platforms.”
Standardizing on HashiCorp meant more time for engineers to help the business with mission-critical work.
The cutting-edge tools also created excitement for job candidates, and helped SPH Media to attract and retain
engineering talent. With HashiCorp, SPH Media had improved its infrastructure use and built brand awarenessas an innovative organization.

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY | SPH MEDIA

Outcomes
Accelerated innovation and time to market by cutting application deployment timefrom 3 months to 2 weeks

Automated workflows for easier and more efficient cloud adoption

Reusable code simplified deployment and reduced effort to achieve regulatorycompliance

Reduced risk of security breach, as well as blast radius in the event of abreachAutomatically enforced deployment standards reduced the time it takes to correct
security misconfigurations

Reduced operational and business costs via consolidation of cloudprovisioning and security tools

Solution
SPH Media and its cloud platform team adopted the HashiCorp Cloud suite and standardized its modernization
process on HashiCorp tools. This allowed SPH Media to move to a federated model for consuming cloud
resources, enabling developers to deploy faster while lowering security risks. HashiCorp adoption also helped
SPH Media earn brand credibility as a cutting-edge technical organization, and attract new talents to maintainits new and modern approach.

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY | SPH MEDIA

SPH Media Partners
Yong Wen is an automation-obsessed developer who heads SPH Media’s cloud
platform team. He has experience with Kubernetes, DevOps, cloud computing,and HashiCorp tools. He remains an active contributor to HashiCorp tools andopen-source community.

Yong Wen Chua
Head of Platform
Engineering

George began his technical career as the co-founder and CTO of a number ofprivate and public startups. Now leading SPH Media’s Engineering Department,
he spends his time striving to enable teams to achieve their goal to transform
SPH Media into an industry-leading, digital-first publisher.

George Irwin
Director of Engineering

Technology Stack•Infrastructure: AWS, Google Cloud, Aliyun, and VMware•

Workload type: Linux, Windows•Container runtime: Containerd•

Orchestrator: Kubernetes/ECS•

CI/CD: Github Actions, CodePipeline•

Version control: GitHub•

Data service: S3, EBS•Provisioning: HashiCorp Terraform Cloud•

Secrets management: HCP Vault, HCP Boundary, AWS Security HubCUSTOMER CASE STUDY | SPH MEDIA