IT Insights
Compliance & Regulatory
PIPL, PDPA, APPI, MAS TRM, SFC, GDPR, and other regulatory frameworks in Asia.
October 05, 2026 | 25 min
Managed IT Services Lesson: Our Cross-Border IT Infrastructure Deployment Succeeded, Yet We Paid in Full Over One Customs Document
Our cross-border IT infrastructure deployment and onsite install succeeded, but unclear customs terms in this IT outsourcing deal meant a RMB 300,000+ payout
September 29, 2026 | 16 min
One ITAD Policy, Three Countries: The Certificate an Auditor Will Actually Accept
For the regional IT asset owner or facilities lead retiring three or four years of devices across Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam in one programme — usually triggered by an audit or a lease event. What an erasure or destruction certificate actually has to show before an auditor will accept it, where chain of custody breaks between three countries, what genuinely differs by jurisdiction versus what should never be assumed, and how to write one group ITAD policy that survives three different sets of local logistics.
September 25, 2026 | 21 min
Stage One Is a Tenant and Two Laptops: Building IT for a Newly Licensed Hong Kong Asset Manager
For the COO or operations lead at a newly licensed 3-15 person Hong Kong asset manager in a serviced office. Why the commercial clock and the regulatory clock cause most IT rebuilds; the smallest defensible stage-one set that lets you trade tomorrow; how to keep your own audit trail while staff work inside a partner's or administrator's environment; what the full licensed estate adds; what deliberately not to buy yet; and how each stage maps to the evidence regulators and auditors typically ask for.
September 17, 2026 | 25 min
The Auditor Asked to See the Guest Network: Captive Portal and Network Separation at a Hong Kong Firm
A Hong Kong firm's guest Wi-Fi worked fine, until a client's supplier review asked for evidence that visitors could not reach the file server. Why "we have guest Wi-Fi" and "guest Wi-Fi is segregated" are different claims, what a captive portal does and does not prove, what auditors actually ask for and what tends to satisfy them, an honest look at rolling out 802.1X, and a realistic five-week response sequence.
September 11, 2026 | 16 min
Two Hundred Drives in a Store Room: A Singapore Manufacturer's Hardware Refresh Problem
A composite scenario from Singapore: a precision-electronics manufacturer consolidates two sites and refreshes an ageing fleet, and ends up with roughly two hundred drives locked in a store room because nobody can answer "can you prove the data is gone?" What a certified, per-serial disposal programme changes about that question.
September 10, 2026 | 18 min
IT Support in Beijing for a Foreign Insurer's Office: The Evidence Test
A composite scenario: a foreign insurance group's licensed Beijing entity passes every day-to-day IT check and fails the one that matters at audit time - can it show access, patch and data-location records for policyholder data.
September 04, 2026 | 15 min
The Pen-Test Requirement a Hong Kong Payments Firm Didn't See Coming
A composite scenario from Hong Kong: a licensed payments firm faces a routine regulatory review asking for evidence of penetration testing, and finds a two-year-old PDF isn't evidence of anything current. What a maintained testing cadence changes, and where an IT partner's role stops.
September 04, 2026 | 16 min
The Analyst Who Left in March
A composite scenario from Hong Kong: a brokerage reconciles eighteen months of leavers against active accounts and the lists do not match. Why offboarding fails when it is treated as a task at the end rather than a record kept all along.
July 29, 2026 | 14 min
The 90-Day IT Readiness Plan for a New China WFOE
A day-by-day 90-day IT readiness plan for a new China WFOE - what's possible pre-entity, and the network, cloud, helpdesk and MLPS/PIPL milestones for days 1-30, 31-60 and 61-90.
July 28, 2026 | 16 min
MAS TRM Checklist for Outsourced IT and Cyber Security in Singapore
A practical, vendor-facing MAS TRM checklist for Singapore finance-sector IT and compliance leads outsourcing IT or cyber security — due diligence, contract clauses, incident reporting and a pre-signing checklist.