Ian Loe

Ian has more than 27 years of experience in the IT industry with wide industry experience spanning public sector to financial services. He has deep knowledge in senior management roles having served as a CISO, CTO and CIO for various organisations.

Today Ian is the CIO in a large conglomerate and responsible for the management of cybersecurity, infrastructure, architecture & data engineering for the group. Ian has introduced many modern approaches to technology management including implementing Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI), DevSecOps, FinOps, SRE, Risk Based Management, and the use of Breach & Attack Simulation (BAS) platforms. This forward-looking mindset has enabled the organisations to improve their IT ROIs and help the business to be more agile in meeting market demands.

With 13 years of experience with a technology vendor and 13 years in an end-user environment, Ian is well placed to have a balanced view on technology acquisition strategies for organisations. With his background in running technology outsourcing, he has the unique experience to turn corporate IT from a cost centre to a revenue centre.

Besides the strategic roles he had played, Ian has held other senior appointments such as Director, Government Cybersecurity Operations and was responsible for managing cybersecurity operations for the whole of government in Singapore, which includes the monitoring of and response to cybersecurity incidents. With hands on experience in running operations at scale, Ian can truly appreciate strategic impact of policies and strategies on daily business operations.

Ian has also authored 2 books on Cybersecurity Architecture and Modern Secured Networks.

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Links to my books on Amazon

My History

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I spent my formative years in the Singapore schools systems with my primary and secondary education at Anglo-Chinese School (ACS) and later at National Junior College (NJC).

My Early Education Journey

I spent my 1st 10 years of formal education at ACS. This is a pretty well know school in Singapore founded in 1886 by Bishop William Fitzjames Oldham as an extension of the Methodist Church. I then furthered my education at the National Junior College (NJC) where I did my A-Levels.

What kind of boy is the ACS boy?

The ACS boy, even in my time, was an energetic, spry and unconventional creature. A sense of humour and mischief is not far from his fertile mind. Every time I see a group of them together, I observe this special characteristic. There are many symptoms of this. Unusual class or school projects. New initiatives taken by the boys. We had them also when I was in school. Perhaps a certain kind of swagger and over self-confidence - this makes boys from the more staid and conventional schools green with envy!

Even the creativity that goes into nicknames for favourite teachers - in my time we had Gobi Desert, Ah Gong and many unmentionable nicknames. I know the tradition still goes on!

The light-heartedness, the sense of fun and humour. Mix this with a serious determination to excel in the classroom and in the sports field. Mix this further with a sense of duty and a sense of what is morally right and Godly. You have a very powerful mixture. Am I realistic in my diagnosis of the ACS boy? I certainly hope so. ACS boys with such a mixture in them, challenged and inspired by their teachers will make their mark not only on the school, but also on our society.

- Dr. Tay Eng Soon 1988

National Junior College (NJC) was founded on 20 January 1969 making it the first Junior College in Singapore. In keeping with its name and philosophy, the College claims no affiliation with any secondary school but instead draws its students from a wide spectrum. In addition, Singapore students learn alongside students from India, China, Hong Kong, Korea as well as ASEAN countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. NJC also plays host to German, PRC, Taiwanese, Vietnamese and Japanese students in exchange programmes.

up till 1988

After my A-levels, I enlisted into the Singapore Armed Forces as a Commando Leader with the 1st Commando Battalion.

Singapore Armed Forces
COMMANDO

Serving my national service with the Commandos was one of the best times of my life. Established life long friendship and obtained valuable life skills.

I am an Airborne trooper! A paratrooper!
I jump by parachute from any place in flight.
I volunteered to do it knowing well the hazards of my choice.
I am an elite trooper, a sky trooper, a shock trooper, an elite trooper.
I blaze the way to far-flung goals-behind, before, above the foe's front line.
I never find a fellow trooper I cherish as a sacred trust the lives of the men with whom I serve. Leaders have my fullest loyalty, and those I lead never find me lacking.
I have pride in the Airborne.
I never let it down.

In peace I do not shirk the dullest duty nor protest the toughest training. In battle I fear no foe's ability nor under-estimate his prowess, power and guile.
I fight him with all my might and skill-ever alert to evade capture or escape a trap.
I never surrender though I may be the last. I belong to a proud and glorious team......
the Airborne, the Army, my country.
I am a trooper of the sky!
I am my Nation's best. In peace and war I never fail.
Anywhere, anytime, in anything......
I am Airborne!

1988-1991

After my time in the Armed Forces, I began actively scuba diving and working my way to be a Dive Master and further as an Instructor (1996).

My Diving Adventures

I have been diving since 1991 and been a dive instructor since 1996. Here are some of the highlights in my diving adventure.

1991-Present

After I left the army, I moved to Melbourne, Australia to get my Bachelor of Computing (Computer Science) at Monash University where I developed a Neural Network to recognise letters from a broken dot matrix printer.

Life at Monash

While Studying in Australia, I also took up a few side classes to learn skills at being a car mechanic and a locksmith! This was the time of my life where I learned a lot about the F&B industry by working in a Chinese restaurant for 3 years.

This is a picture of Clayton Campus which is my home campus for Computer Science.

1992-1995

After graduation, I joined Hewlett Packard Company as an IT solutions specialist focusing on HR Systems. My main areas of focus was the Training Management System (TMS) that was running on a HP3000.

My Days at HP

Hewlett-Packard Company

This was my 1st full time job after graduation and started within HRIT. I was working on the HP3000 and working on the Learning Management System. I also got involved in PeopleSoft development.

In this job I was based in Singapore and later Palo Alto, CA at corporate HQ.

1996-1997

In 1997,I got an opportunity to move to the Bay Area and work at HP HQ at Palo Alto, CA. In this role, I was still managing TMS but eventually moved to supporting PeopleSoft HRMS and ended up as a developer for the incentive pay system and developed the 1st wireless application based on the Palm VII.

1997-2000

This is when I moved from the Bay area to the East Coast (Boston/Connecticut). With my work at HP on web applications and Java, I was recruited to join Keane Inc. as an architect. Here I worked on a few notable projects - a pioneer with web based event and travel management system and the modernisation of legacy systems for a health insurance firm.

2000-2001

In 2001, I took up a job in New York with Avon to help start up the enterprise architecture team. Here we developed many processes for technology and change governance. On the technical front, I worked on a lot of mainframe modernisation - OS/390 to zOS, building 1st web service for Visual Basic applications to access CISC data, SQL adapters to query IMS data and upgrading the mainframe from token ring to ethernet. I also worked on early stage deployment of VMware virtualisation.

2001 - 2004

In 2004, I enrolled at Pace University in New York City to get my Master of Science (Information Systems) where I developed a paper on ACID translation over web services (before WS standards were published).

2002-2004

In 2004, I joined Bowne which was one of the oldest companies in the US. As a financial printer, the business is very seasonal and I worked on using virtualisation to help optimise seasonal workload. We also worked on security design for all the systems and this was my entry into Cybersecurity having obtained my CISSP while working here.

2004-2006

In Dec 2006, I moved back to Singapore to join an exciting worldwide team in IBM called SOA Advanced Technologies. This is a role where I worked on "first of a kind" solutions and had many breakthrough. In this role I filed my 1st USPTO patent on SOA Governance Methodology and worked on many interesting solutions like the early days of IBM Docs and multi user collaboration on a web spreadsheet (2009). In 2010, I moved to head ASEAN Security services and was one of the 1st person in Singapore to obtained my Certified Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSK). I was also certified as a Certified Information Security Manager (CISM), ISO 27001 Lead Auditor, and PGP certified technician during this time.

2006-2010

In 2011, I joined Computer Science Corporation as the Director of Governance and also took on the role of acting Director of Projects and Programme Management.

2011

I later joined IBM as a Social Business Evangelist. In this role I filed my 2nd patent on connecting a PABX system to Lotus Notes Calendar system for automatic attendance taking. I was developing new processes for organisations learning to adopt social media technologies to help their business. Examples of this are Social CRM, Social selling, collaboration and how to move to a more agile workplace.

2011-2014

In 2014 I joined Essilor AMERA (Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Russia, Africa) as the Director of Enterprise Architecture and Integration. In this role the major achievements are the building of the information architecture frameworks and Master Data Management for the region. The move to consolidate the data centre servers to full hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) on Nutanix. We also implemented a MDM solution based on a Graph database and moved a lot of business logic to business rules engine.

2014-2016

In 2017, I joined the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech) as the Director of Government Cybersecurity Operations where I was managing the Government Incident Response teams, the threat intelligence team and the later on also manage the Ministries CISOs.

2017-2019

In 2017, I started as an adjunct at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) where I teach a series of classes from Cybersecurity Architecture and digital Forensics to Quantum Computing. The classes I teach can be found at https://ianloeclasses.net

2017 - Present

In 2019, I joined NE Digital (part of NTUC Enterprise Cooperative Limited) as the SVP of Cybersecurity to build up a joint cybersecurity team to manage all cybersecurity matters across the group. In oct 2020, I assume the role of Chief Technology Officer and also took on the management of Infrastructure, Quality Engineering, Architecture and Developer Experience teams. Major achievements here is the inclusion of our IR team to the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) and the adoption of FinOps in infrastructure management.

2019 - 2022

In 2022, I joined DFI Retail Group as the Chief Information Officer to build up the foundation technologies for the organisation. I oversaw the creation of the tech stack and infrastructure modernisation of the organisation. Besides the infrastructure modernisation work, I also build up the modern data lake and data engineering practice to support the move to a data-driven organisation.

2022 - 2023

In mid 2023, I relocated back to Singapore with the same role as the Chief Information Officer at DFI Retail Group as above.

2023-Present

Ian Loe Technologist. Educator. Visionary.