Hummingbird Solutions specializes in Project Portfolio Management (PPM) services. A number of Hummingbird customers, principally those in government agencies, require a sovereign cloud environment. Hummingbird partnered with AUCloud, a VMware Sovereign Cloud Provider, for its development and pilot infrastructure.
The partnership enabled Hummingbird to build its development platforms and deliver new solutions for its client in just weeks. The
same solutions would have taken months to complete with on premises infrastructure. This has supported Hummingbird to meet its deadlines, expand its contracts with its customers, and grow the company effectively.
Providing highly secure and sovereign data
environments
Hummingbird is an innovative, modern Australian company with over 30 years of experience enabling organizations to successfully manage their projects through specialist PPM platforms and ongoing Enterprise Project Management Office (ePMO) services. Hummingbird PPM solutions help companies ensure they have the right capabilities to deliver projects that make a bigger strategic impact and drive business growth.
AUCloud is an Australian sovereign cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, exclusively focused on government, defense, intelligence, and other critical national industries and security-conscious enterprise communities.
AUCloud services enable customers to benefit from sovereign data
protection while matching the scale, automation, elasticity, and lower costs of hyperscale public cloud offerings.
“We were able to run within AUCloud who helped pilot the application, so we were still able to achieve our project timelines. The on-premises solution didn’t allow us to do that, but AUCloud did.”
AUCloud partnership results in the timely delivery of projects
Hummingbird customers include organizations from many regulated industries, which makes them especially conscious of providing secure sovereign data protection.
To ensure a fully secure, sovereign environment, Hummingbird must guarantee that the data of its
customers remains in Australia and is subject only to Australian laws.
For Australian Government agencies, data sovereignty is increasingly important as they realize the extent to which components of their data specifically support, account and metadata—can be moved offshore when they use regular public cloud providers. This potentially leaves
Australian data vulnerable to extraterritorial intervention because these providers must adhere to their own jurisdictional laws.
As there are significant costs and complexities involved in building infrastructure, particularly for a bespoke IT services business, Hummingbird engaged in an evaluation to determine the best sovereign partner to work with. The business decided to partner with AUCloud, which offered sovereign cloud IaaS with a protected environment certified by the Infosec Registered Assessors Program (IRAP). Within a day, AUCloud was able to provide the environment Hummingbird needed, which included virtual machines with its operating systems and application installed.
Typically, setting up a sandpit environment with an indoor environment on a public cloud would have taken months and would have been too expensive to enable the level of protected compliance needed. Moreover, Hummingbird did not have the knowledge of web data and data sovereignty to troubleshoot problems. Without partnering with AUCloud to deliver a cloud solution quickly, the Hummingbird initial project would have been delayed by at least three months. Hummingbird risked missing out on expansion contracts within defense agencies if deadlines were missed.
“We were able to run within AUCloud, who helped pilot the application, so we were still able to achieve our project timelines. The on-premises solution didn’t allow us to do that, but AUCloud did,” says Andrew Thomlinson-Munn, solution architect, Hummingbird Solutions.
“It’s a lot faster and easier, and a lot more costeffective for us to go to a cloud provider. The benefits of working with AUCloud are the support and rapid response that receive. And of course, the sovereign solution that we’re achieving makes AUCloud the right partner for us.”
Leveraging partnerships for deep technical expertise in infrastructure
AUCloud provides the convenience of a readily available virtual data center and the management of operating system environments within its ecosystem. As a result, Hummingbird did not have to build a support team for its infrastructure, which would have been a huge resource challenge since it specialized in building bespoke virtual applications rather than multi-rack environments. “It’s a lot faster and easier, and a lot more cost-effective for us to go to a cloud provider. The benefits of working with AUCloud are the support and rapid response that we receive. And of course, the sovereign solution that we’re achieving makes AUCloud the right partner for us,” says Thomlinson-Munn. Additionally, without assistance from AUCloud, Hummingbird would only be able to provide consulting and managed services. It would not be able to offer hosting capabilities or platform configuration to build capabilities, such as its application stack or Enterprise Project Management Offices platform.
“Apart from the value that we’re already bringing to our customers, we were able to rapidly develop our solution for them which would not have been done with an onpremises solution. We were able to achieve that because we could build out our pilot in AUCloud,” he says. The partnership with AUCloud and VMware lends additional credibility to Hummingbird, helping the business secure large-scale contracts from government agencies and other industries that require strict security and data protection. As Hummingbird specializes in providing project management and portfolio management services, its success depends on very deep technical expertise in infrastructure and infrastructure management. “We wouldn’t have been able to survive if we had to hire all the expertise to build up an environment like this. The initial costs just for people, let alone the costs for the data center space, physical infrastructure, and software licensing would make it simply unfeasible for it to do what it does,” says Thomlison-Munn.
