When data security and compliance matters.
Choosing the right technology partner could mean the difference between you achieving your business outcomes or not and getting the most out of your IT investment. Collaboro, a leading digital asset management company, had unique data management requirements as they looked to scale their business. Top of mind was cost, data security and certainty over sovereignty. Enter Macquarie Cloud Services, with a tailored solution powered by Dell Technologies, that delivered cost predictability, and the security and compliance checks required by Collaboro’s enterprise and government customers.
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Know what you’re great at. Partner well on the rest.
Focus on core business, and partner on everything else. That’s the fundamental belief of Warwick Boulter, CEO of Collaboro, a leading digital asset management company that works with some of the world’s biggest brands and government entities to store and preserve the quality of their digital media assets – McDonald’s Australia and New Zealand, Optus, Sportsbet, Youi and the NSW Department of Education, to name just a few.
“We store and manage video, artwork and document assets for our customers – all those things that are big and painful to manage locally, and usually require meta data to surface them or understand the usage and copyright licensing,” Warwick explains. “We manage more than 3.5 petabytes (PB) of data, equivalent to around 70 million tall filing cabinets.”
To maintain exceptional service and focus on its core business, Collaboro continues to invest in platform and process. The focus is on managing customer data with lower and more predictable costs; and on preparing customer data for the future of generative artificial intelligence (AI).
Perhaps just as importantly, the Collaboro team has made smart decisions around what isn’t core business.
“Although the team at Collaboro are cloud application experts, we’re not cloud infrastructure experts,” said Warwick. “We knew we needed to form the right partnerships to bring those skills to the table.”
"Although the team at Collaboro are cloud application experts, we’re not cloud infrastructure experts. We knew we needed to form the right partnerships to bring those skills to the table."
Warwick Boulter
CEO of Collaboro
Public or private cloud: the million dollar question.
As Collaboro’s business grew, it was seeking alternatives to its previous public cloud solution as storage and egress/ingress (transferring data to and from the cloud) costs started increasing, This presented challenges around both cost management, and predictability of pricing for its customer base.
“Other significant considerations for our customers include data security and sovereignty – ensuring their data is housed onshore – to help manage risk and compliance issues,” added Warwick.
“Technically, we also need a provider capable of managing enterprise-levels of storage – the nature of our business means that we need extensive networking and compute capabilities.”
Collaboro selected Macquarie Cloud Services to develop a unique solution leveraging its Launch Private Cloud solution. Developed in partnership with Dell, the team at Macquarie Cloud Services developed a customised solution to give Collaboro more certainty around cloud costs; as well as meeting key requirements around flexibility, availability, security and sovereignty.
Technical solution overview.
Customised Launch Private Cloud platform, built on Dell Technologies infrastructure solutions including Dell ECS Enterprise Object Storage and Dell PowerEdge Servers.
Dell PowerProtect Data Manager provides in-built protection for container-based Kubernetes environment.
Seamless connectivity to Microsoft Azure for public-facing workloads and future workloads (e.g. AI).
Secure connectivity and firewall management, including high-speed Megaport cloud bandwidth connection.
Housed within Macquarie Data Centres’ secure, government-certified facilities.
Results.
The Collaboro team has witnessed a range of benefits since migrating to the private cloud environment. With Macquarie Cloud Services keeping cloud egress and ingress charges to zero, there have been significant cost savings in terms of monthly cloud spend, as well as greater transparency and predictability of pricing.
“The Launch Private Cloud solution provided an instant cost reduction of about 30 per cent, and that figure is projected to rise to around 50 per cent as the environment scales and more data is added,” says Warwick.
“We’ve been able to pass on a wholesale cost to our partners rather than using our previous retail model. This is important because media storage services are becoming cheaper, so we’re able to remain competitive.
“We’re able to provide a service that our customers can depend on, with greater visibility and traceability of cost, through our
capability monitoring inside the Macquarie Cloud Services environment and underpinned by Dell Technologies infrastructure.”
The new environment has also provided greater reliability and enhanced performance to Collaboro and the customer base –
particularly availability of critical assets, and quick troubleshooting and incident handling.
“If our customers are having a problem, we need to respond to them instantly – and we expect the same of our cloud services provider,” said Warwick. “That’s where Macquarie Cloud Services comes in. They are a local business offering local support, which is in our time zone and in our location. We know that we can rely on them.”
And finally, the new private cloud environment is helping to manage any concerns related to governance, risk and compliance – particularly data security and sovereignty.
“We’re working with Macquarie Cloud Services to help manage our customers’ risk and compliance needs in terms of hosting their data,” said Warwick. “It’s given so much comfort to the Collaboro leadership team and Board.
“Overall, our partnership with Macquarie Cloud Services allows us to leverage their expertise and skills in terms of managing data and security and our networking environment. They offer us capabilities that we don’t have in-house.”
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"Overall, our partnership with Macquarie Cloud Services allows us to leverage their expertise and skills in terms of managing data and security and our networking environment. They offer us capabilities that we don’t have in-house."
Warwick Boulter
CEO of Collaboro
Preparing for the future.
The new solution is also helping Collaboro prepare for the future, with technologies such as AI and machine learning (ML) set to transform the asset management landscape.
Collaboro customers are focused on three key areas of certainty: firstly, that their data is both secure and sovereign; second, that the enormous creative-wealth of visual assets are independently staged, and therefore able to be leveraged for algo-training and brand knowledge by emerging and as-yet-unknown generative AI toolkits; and third, that there is consistent certainty of the above two topics to empower decision making that has long term implications.
“Our partnership with Macquarie Cloud Services empowers our customers with the certainty they need to lay the long runway required to harness the power of AI and ML in the future of creative asset production and use. From the Collaboro point of view, we don’t need to worry about pricing changes eroding our margin, and we get to leverage the kind of security, sovereignty and service layers that MCS has built to specifically cater for the most secure levels of Government and Enterprise in Australia.
With the right partners, magic can happen.
The three-way partnership between Macquarie Cloud Services, Collaboro and Dell Technologies is a testament to the kind of magic that can happen when all parties are culturally aligned, passionate about technology and working to achieve great outcomes for customers and their customers, according to Jonathan Staff, Head of Private Cloud at Macquarie Cloud Services.
“Choosing the right technology partner can mean the difference between achieving your business outcomes or not; and getting the most out of your technology investment,” says Jonathan.
“Macquarie Cloud Services is one of only 12 partners worldwide with the “Powered by Dell” Designation, and the strength of that partnership helped us solve the unique challenges Collaboro was facing as they were trying to scale their business.”
Adds Renee DeLaine, GM A/NZ Global Alliances and Cloud Service Providers at Dell Technologies:
“That’s the power of the Dell Technologies Partner Program – providing differentiation and innovation to our partner network to provide a better outcome for our joint clients.”
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Services we supplied for Collaboro.
Launch® Private Cloud
Private Cloud Solution
How Macquarie Cloud Services helped Collaboro.
Learn how the team at Macquarie Cloud Services developed a customised solution to give Collaboro more certainty around cloud costs, as well as meeting key requirements around flexibility, availability, security and sovereignty.