Establishing the Cloud Foundation for a Reliable Application Build
Industry
Facilities / Operations
Company size
50 - 200 Employees
About
Founded in 1989 and headquartered in Rockdale, NSW, Glad Group is a privately owned, Australian property and facility management company. It employs over 3,500 people to deliver integrated services—including cleaning, security, concierge, and maintenance—across more than 440 commercial, retail, education, and government assets nationally.
Since 2012
Increase to top-line revenue since using Artifact
The Situation
Glad Group needed the right technical foundation in place before application development moved too far ahead. Cloud environment architecture, staging and production separation, deployment pipelines, and access control are not things you retrofit easily once development is underway.
Starting with the foundation creates the conditions for a reliable build. The work was deliberately infrastructure-first: make the environments predictable, separate risk from production, and give the development team a clean operational base to build on.
Why they called us
Glad Group called Halcrow for the kind of work that is easy to undervalue until it is missing: cloud architecture, environment separation, deployment discipline, and credential control.
The objective was not to create a flashy launch asset. It was to reduce operational risk before the product build accelerated. A properly configured foundation would let the application team move faster later because the basics were already stable.
How we worked
The engagement was scoped and executed at the infrastructure layer: establishing the cloud environments, deployment pipeline configuration, and access structure for the Glad Group application.
The work covered cloud environment provisioning with staging and production separation, DevOps pipeline configuration, access control and credential management, and environment documentation for the development team.
The foundational DevOps work was completed as a standalone engagement, with the infrastructure ready to receive the application build.
WHAT CHANGED
Glad Group received a production-ready infrastructure foundation before the application build became dependent on unstable environments. The result was not a dramatic visual transformation, but a quieter and more valuable operational outcome: a reliable base for future delivery.
This represents a category of Halcrow engagement that does not always produce the most dramatic case study narrative — but reflects an important truth about technology delivery. Getting the infrastructure right before the product is built is unglamorous work. It does not generate screenshots. It does not have a launch moment. But it creates the foundation on which a reliable product gets built.
WHY THIS WORKED
Law 2: Build the right conditions before building the product. An application built on a poorly configured environment accumulates operational risk from day one. Staging and production environments that are not properly separated produce bugs that only appear in production. Deployment pipelines that are configured inconsistently produce releases that behave differently across environments.
The Glad Group engagement was small and foundational — the kind of work that earns its value over the life of the application rather than at the moment of delivery.