Context
A B2B SaaS company headquartered in Hangzhou had just incorporated a Singapore Pte Ltd to serve enterprise customers across SG / MY / ID. The plan: 12 engineers + 4 commercial fly to Singapore over six weeks, lease an office in CBD, get to work.
The China-side IT team owned the global production stack and had neither the bandwidth nor the local knowledge to set up Singapore. Two weeks in, they had: no .sg domain (registrar friction), no Microsoft 365 tenant (couldn’t decide between China-region or international), no office network (the building’s recommended ISP required a 6-week lead time), no laptops (Lenovo SG dealer needed a local PO they didn’t yet have routed), no PDPA posture, and a vague sense that the cross-border traffic between Hangzhou production and the future SG office would “probably need a special line.”
They had 16 people landing in 4 weeks. They engaged TWO TWO.
What we did
Week 1 — Foundation
- Cloud accounts opened: AWS Singapore, Azure SEA International — all under TWO TWO reseller pricing, single SGD invoice
.com.sgand.sgdomains registered (TWO TWO is an accredited SGNIC registrar) plus.comcorporate identity- Microsoft 365 E3 tenant provisioned (international region for cross-border collaboration with Hangzhou HQ), 16 seats licensed
- WeChat Work / DingTalk International federated in for the Hangzhou team to keep using their familiar tools
Week 2 — Network and devices
- Office network design (Cisco Meraki MX / MS / MR) ordered with expedited shipment from SG inventory; we installed and configured on lease day
- CMI cross-border circuit — 1 Gbps Hangzhou ↔ Singapore on China Mobile International with BGP failover. 4-week provisioning started week 1 to land just in time
- 16 Lenovo ThinkPads procured, imaged with M365 + Microsoft Intune MDM + WeChat Work, delivered to the SG office
- Office mobile lines with M1 Business — 16 numbers ported
Week 3 — Identity and security
- Microsoft Entra ID as single source of truth — every M365 / WeChat Work / AWS / Azure login flows through it
- Conditional access policies: MFA enforced, geofence on sensitive resources, block legacy auth
- Defender for Endpoint deployed across all 16 laptops
- PDPA posture document drafted — data inventory, retention policy, cookie / privacy posture for the SG-facing product
Week 4 — Operations handover
- 24×7 bilingual helpdesk (Mandarin / English / WeChat / Slack / phone) live
- Monthly cost review cadence set
- Hangzhou HQ liaison protocol — quarterly architecture review with their China-side IT lead so the two sides stay aligned
Results
- 4 weeks from engagement to all 16 staff working productively on landing day
- 18 separate vendor conversations (registrar, ISP, dealer, mobile, PDPA consultant, cross-border carrier, etc.) consolidated into one TWO TWO PO
- SGD 64K first-stage cost, with ongoing managed services at SGD 5.8K / month
- First M365 outage, eight months later: detected and resolved by TWO TWO helpdesk before the customer noticed
What we learned
The hardest part wasn’t any single piece of work — it was the time the COO would have spent context-switching across 18 vendor relationships in a language and regulatory environment he didn’t know. The 4-week timeline was the deliverable; the real product was removing his cognitive load.
Cross-border circuit lead time was the unforgiving variable. We started the CMI provisioning on day 3 of week 1 — three weeks before anything else needed it — because anything later would have left the team on consumer broadband during their critical first month.