EGL Tours secures digital growth with F5
Hong Kong’s EGL Tours modernized its infrastructure with cloud migration, enhancing security and the customer experience. By adopting F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP, EGL improved real-time threat protection and app performance. It also built a scalable foundation—which enables secure growth across APIs, digital platforms, and edge environments—without disrupting operations.
Business challenge
Established in 1987, EGL Tours Company Ltd. (EGL) is one of Hong Kong’s most recognized travel agencies, known for its curated outbound travel services—particularly to Japan. For many years, EGL Tours operated using a traditional on-premises infrastructure, effectively supporting customer interactions through both offline and digital channels.
As global travel resumed and digital engagement surged following the global COVID-19 pandemic, EGL saw a significant rise in online bookings and user activity. With customers increasingly relying on mobile and web platforms for planning, the company recognized that its legacy environment could no longer deliver the scale, agility, and resilience needed to meet modern expectations.
In addition, as EGL’s business grew, the company identified new opportunities to enhance operational efficiency and the customer experience. The increasing complexity of digital operations highlighted the need for faster performance, real-time insights, and more agile security management. These evolving requirements underscored the importance of investing in a modern digital infrastructure—one capable of supporting continued growth, ensuring seamless service during peak travel periods, and enabling rapid response to emerging challenges.
To address these issues and prepare for continued growth, EGL made a strategic decision to migrate its applications and infrastructure to the cloud in 2024. Partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SoftwareOne, EGL aimed to establish a modern, scalable, and high-performing digital foundation. Ensuring security without compromising performance—particularly during traffic spikes and high-demand travel seasons— became a top priority.
Solution
As part of its modernization journey, EGL evaluated several cloud-native security solutions to protect its applications and ensure a seamless digital experience for its customers. While initial options offered easy integration and cost benefits, they fell short in critical areas—such as real-time visibility, centralized policy management, and protection against automated attacks. Solutions from a variety of well-known security vendors were assessed, but many lacked the operational simplicity, policy portability, and deep threat context EGL required.
EGL engaged with F5 as a strategic partner for help assessing long-term value beyond upfront costs. The focus was on how security could serve as an enabler of customer trust and experience quality beyond providing defense. This consultative engagement made it clear that EGL needed a solution purpose-built for dynamic, hybrid environments.
Alfred Kam, Chief Information Officer at EGL Tours, says, “F5 wasn’t just offering a product—they helped us connect security with business value. Their guidance made it clear how the right solution could power both protection and the customer experience.”
EGL selected F5 Distributed Cloud Web Application and API Protection (WAAP), a SaaS-based platform offering comprehensive security for web apps and APIs. The solution allowed EGL to rapidly detect and neutralize security threats, maintain high application uptime and performance, and build resilience into its cloud infrastructure. It also supported faster deployment of new services, while ensuring consistent policy enforcement across on-premises, public cloud, and edge environments.
Results
Detect and respond to threats in real time
The solution allows EGL to rapidly detect and neutralize security threats, maintain high application uptime and performance, and build resilience into its cloud infrastructure. EGL gained granular, AI-driven observability into app traffic—including bot activity, behavioral anomalies, and transaction surges. This has reduced incident investigation time and improved confidence in EGL’s digital risk posture.
At the same time, unifying security across all environments ensures consistent policy enforcement across on-premises, public cloud, and edge environments while reducing the IT management burden.
Deliver modernization without disruption
EGL transitioned to a cloud-native security model without downtime. The migration preserved critical app protection policies while boosting security agility and response time.
As EGL’s infrastructure has evolved with support from AWS and SoftwareOne, the F5 solution has played a critical role in safeguarding the performance and reliability of digital travel services. This ensured that speed and scale didn’t come at the expense of security or the customer experience.
Gain an agile foundation for innovation
The F5 solution supports faster deployment of new services and empowers EGL to scale securely across APIs, customer-facing platforms, and edge environments. With native support for CI/CD pipelines and business logic protection, it lays a flexible, future-ready foundation for continuous digital innovation.
With a modern, secure, and scalable architecture in place, EGL is well-positioned to deliver seamless and trusted travel experiences—while building digital resilience for the future.
- Gain real-time threat detection and response
- Unify security across all environments
- Speed app deployment and innovation
- Improve uptime and performance
- Deliver a scalable foundation for future growth
- A surge in digital traffic post-travel recovery
- A lack of infrastructure agility and visibility
- Limited threat detection capabilities
- Innovation slowed by deployment delays
- Inconsistent policy control across environments