querkraft architekten, a renowned architectural firm in Austria, was faced with the challenge of expanding the Liaunig Museum, a unique structure that houses the private art collection of industrialist Herbert Liaunig. The museum, which is mostly underground, is located in the Carinthian landscape of southern Austria and is known for its distinctive, 160-meter gallery wing. The challenge was to expand the museum by 2,500 square meters while maintaining the original concept of the building. The expansion needed to include a special exhibition hall, a space for sculptures, and two additional spaces for presentations and other purposes. The firm was also tasked with designing the Citygate Tower, a high-rise residential building in Vienna. The challenge was to design a building that was not only aesthetically pleasing but also practical and flexible for the residents.

Weatherhead Architecture, a London-based architectural studio, was tasked with the design of a new town center, Butterfly Square, as part of the Allarp master plan. The design was to be pedestrian and child-friendly, integrating with the surrounding nature park and providing a series of spaces for various activities. The design also needed to accommodate parking without disrupting the pedestrian spaces. The design concept was to create a building that resembled the open wings of a butterfly, linking to the nature park. However, the design process presented several challenges. Parking requirements often create problems when designing pedestrian spaces. Additionally, creating a fully working Building Information Modeling (BIM) model that produces informative drawings and realistic visualizations was a significant challenge.

The 'Traditional Wooden Constructions of Europe – TRAWCOE' project, funded by the European Commission, aimed to develop an innovative educational and technical solution for vocational education and training in Traditional Timber Building. The project was initiated by EK Association and involved a broad partnership of construction trade representatives, architectural practices, timber processing companies, vocational schools, and non-profit organizations from seven European countries. The consortium aimed to create an online educational tool dealing with timber constructions of heritage importance selected from the countries of the partnership. The challenge was to develop an appropriate educational methodology while providing informal technological solutions for the key issues raised by each structure. The goal was to create a working prototype that could be developed for similar initiatives in the future.

The Miyanomori Elementary School in Higashi-Matsushima, Japan, was devastated by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011. The disaster resulted in significant loss of life and property, particularly in Nobiru, a suburb that was almost entirely destroyed. The rebuilding of the school was not just a construction project, but a symbol of hope and resilience for the local community. The challenge was to design a new school building that would uplift the community's spirits and provide a positive outlook for the local children's future. The site chosen for the new school was covered with dense, neglected trees, shrubs, and bushes, which needed to be transformed into a welcoming and diverse woodland. The architectural firm, Coelacanth K&H Architects, faced the challenge of creating a design that would serve as a backdrop to people's activities and not just as a monument.

In 2014, the architectural firm Coelacanth K&H was tasked with designing the Yamaga City Yamaga Elementary School, a project that posed significant challenges. The initial proposal called for a three-floor reinforced concrete structure, but the architects, Kazumi Kudo and Hiroshi Horiba, wanted to utilize the local timber from the region, known for its high-quality 'Aya' cedar. The client was initially concerned about the feasibility of designing a large-scale building with timber, especially given the project's size requirement of almost 9,000 square meters. The architects had previously worked on a smaller timber project, a 2,700 square meter kindergarten, but this new project was significantly larger and more complex. Additionally, the architects wanted to use solid wood from logs, not laminated wood, to take full advantage of the local timber production. This decision added another layer of complexity to the project.

In 2013, HDR|Rice Daubney of Australia and Obayashi Corporation of Japan participated in the Build Sydney Live event, a 48-hour challenge that required participants from around the world to design a new International Convention Centre for Sydney. The project was part of the specified 19 Hectare area of the Darling Harbour Live project and was run virtually using mobile technology. The event represented a significant challenge due to the strict requirements for design development and presentation materials, as well as the need for effective international collaboration between the two companies. The success of their collaboration depended heavily on their use of Open BIM and Graphisoft Archicad Teamwork through the BIM Server.

The Norwegian firm Arkitektgruppen Cubus AS was tasked with the challenge of developing the connection from Mo i Rana to the neighboring fjord and railway, both of which are part of the major transportation system serving the local iron and concrete industries. The main problem was the train tracks running through the center of the town, which created a barrier between the town center and the fjord, preventing any physical link from the town to the fjord. The town had two contrasting qualities – one side was open to the sea, while the other side was highly industrialized. This resulted in a range of urban and natural experiences. The economy of Mo i Rana relied mainly on the steel and concrete industries, which had a dominating influence on the built seafront, where the factories were located.

Goy Architects, a Singapore-based firm, is known for its holistic design solutions that span architecture, interior design, and furnishings. The firm's challenge lies in realizing their design concepts within the constraints of budget and timeline. The custom-made furniture, sourced regionally, adds another layer of logistical complexity to their projects. The firm collaborates with colleagues in Singapore, Chiangmai, and Bali on local and regional projects. Two of their projects, Shizukokoro and The Heng House, presented unique challenges. Shizukokoro, a five-room flat, was inspired by the concept of a 'calm mind' in Japanese and required the creation of an intimate landscape frame for the living room. The Heng House, a double-story terrace house, needed to accommodate a studio space for pro bono Pilates classes and be spacious enough for both intimate and large gatherings.

The Church of St. Martin, a late Gothic-Renaissance style building in Croatia, was left in ruins after the great earthquake of 1880. The church, which is a protected cultural monument, suffered numerous structural cracks and partial or complete demolition of its vaults. Over time, the church was forgotten and never repaired. The challenge was to restore this historic building and revitalize the entire area. The missing elements of the building, such as the tower roof and the nave, needed to be restored. The masonry, cracks, and foundations in the bell tower needed structural repair. The architects also planned to add a new, contemporary dome and a spiral staircase or lift for access to the tower. The main nave’s function was to be restored by adding cubes made from contemporary materials and architectural forms.

DeNA, a Japanese corporation specializing in digital portals, mobile games, and e-commerce platforms, was facing significant challenges with its legacy Web Application Firewall (WAF). The legacy WAF was not only expensive to operate but also had high response times, particularly during traffic spikes. This was a significant issue as DeNA was expanding its offerings and needed to scale its web security posture accordingly. The legacy WAF's admin portal loaded slowly during traffic spikes, preventing the team from addressing issues promptly. Moreover, it was impossible for the DeNA team to reroute customer page requests if their WAF was not performing correctly. The performance issues, coupled with the high cost of scaling hardware investments, made it clear that DeNA needed a new, more efficient solution.

BloomNation, an online flower retailer, faced a significant challenge in late 2019 when it was listed on Built In LA’s 50 Best Small Places to Work list. This recognition boosted their national profile but also attracted malicious actors to their website on a larger scale. The company was inundated with abusive attack traffic, including DDOS, SQLi, XSS, and credential stuffing, as malicious actors attempted to scan their web applications. This situation had a significant impact on the organization. Engineers had to divert their attention from building and deploying product features to manually researching and blocking IP addresses to keep the website operational. The surge in traffic also negatively affected the customer experience, with page load times slowing and the site breaking as attack requests increasingly hit their server instances. BloomNation needed a solution that could not only repel these attacks but also provide their engineering team with the ability to rate limit traffic to quickly tag and identify traffic signals based on custom criteria.

Betterment, an online financial advisor with over $14 billion in assets under management and a user base of over 380,000 customers, needed a solution to protect customer PII and financial assets. The company required a solution that could automatically scale and block attacks without impacting performance or requiring ongoing signature tuning. The company's Engineering and Security teams were particularly concerned about the signal-to-noise ratio based on their previous experience with legacy WAFs. It was crucial for them to find a WAF that could scale automatically and accurately block attacks without increasing support call volume or creating additional work for the Engineering or Security teams.

Blackpepper, a leading e-commerce services provider based in Auckland, New Zealand, faced a significant challenge during the 2020 pandemic lockdown. The firm experienced an exponential increase in traffic, with volumes surging by up to 400 times from the previous year. This sudden surge posed a risk to their operational excellence, and the firm needed to find a way to handle the increased traffic sustainably. Additionally, Blackpepper was also grappling with a wave of denial of service (DDoS) attacks targeting Australia and New Zealand, necessitating a bolstered security posture. At the time, Blackpepper's operations relied on an on-premise data centre and a range of in-house developed applications and tools, including a bespoke Web Application Firewall (WAF). They were also using an external content delivery network (CDN) to serve videos and images to each website. However, their existing vendor was unable to meet the demand for a CDN that delivered everything for their customers' websites, not just visuals.

Namely, a cloud-first, all-in-one HR platform, was experiencing rapid growth, which necessitated the prioritization of its web defense. As the customer base of Namely expanded, so did its responsibility for managing web defenses, including detection, prevention, and response. In a fast-paced agile development environment, security leader Daniel Leslie was tasked with building security and IT from scratch. He was seeking innovative ways to manage website defenses, having had experience with legacy Web Application Firewalls (WAFs). His core criteria for a solution included technical alignment, ease-of-use, best-in-class security functionality, and total cost of ownership (TCO).

Movember, a leading charity organization focused on men’s health, was facing a significant challenge with their web application firewall (WAF) deployment. They had been using a traditional WAF solution that was rigid and unable to scale during peak traffic periods without constant tuning and intervention from their team. This was particularly problematic as Movember had recently transitioned to a cloud environment to better serve their donors and campaign participants, and to streamline their organizational initiatives. The conventional WAF solutions they tried to implement were not compatible with their modern application infrastructure. After six months of struggling to fit a legacy WAF solution into their system, the solution was never fully implemented, causing frustration and resulting in a solution that had to be discarded and replaced.

Gannett, the largest news publisher in the U.S., faced a significant challenge in maintaining its competitive edge in the fast-paced world of digital news publishing. The company's previous content delivery solution relied on a time-to-live-based method for purging content, which resulted in a delay of 45 to 90 seconds before a piece of content could go live. This delay was a significant disadvantage in an industry where being the first to publish a story can significantly impact future traffic to a site. Additionally, Gannett's previous solution did not provide the granular control and visibility needed to handle large traffic spikes effectively. The company also faced challenges in deploying configuration changes, which required a minimum of 60 minutes and often involved going through their previous provider. This process was inefficient and limited the ability of Gannett's developers to make changes quickly and independently.

Cybrary, a growing community that brings together people, companies, and training to revolutionize the cyber security educational experience, was facing a significant challenge. Their legacy web application firewall (WAF) was failing to provide complete attack coverage and usability across its APIs and web properties. With a wide range of pages and training content to protect, Cybrary’s two-person infrastructure team was struggling with issues that their legacy WAF could not address. The legacy WAF was proving extremely difficult to configure and debug without investing significant time and resources. It also provided incomplete attack coverage and blocked valid requests, with no real-time visibility, alerting, or a functional dashboard to monitor activity over time. As security experts, Cybrary needed to maintain their brand identity and ensure their security practice was cutting-edge.

Spread Group, a global fashion and lifestyle provider, faced a significant challenge in maintaining its global scale and converting online clicks into physical products. The company, which operates three distinct brands, needed to weave delivery with security to ensure the smooth operation of its platform. With over 6.17 billion average monthly requests, finding a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to supercharge delivery was a top priority. Additionally, Spread Group needed a robust Web Application Firewall (WAF) that could work in harmony with its constantly evolving platform. The company had a good, internally developed security monitoring and observability infrastructure, but it was not viable long-term. A flexible WAF that could run in blocking mode was needed to provide more time to modernize vulnerable legacy components.

Storytel, a global leader in audiobooks, was faced with a significant challenge when developing their new homepage. The original homepage was built on an outdated tech stack, which was not conducive to the high-performing, optimized experience they aimed to provide their customers. The company wanted to leverage stale-while-revalidate cache control to ensure lightning-fast load times. However, during testing, they discovered that the page load times were over a second, which was unacceptable for a project of such high profile. The issue was traced back to their existing Content Delivery Network (CDN), which did not support the caching strategy they had designed. The CDN did not trigger the stale-while-revalidate process with every request, resulting in slow page loads. The vendor had no plans to change how this directive works, leaving Storytel in a precarious situation on the eve of a global rollout.

The Endless OS Foundation, a social welfare nonprofit, has been working to bridge the digital divide by increasing access to affordable devices and building software that reduces the need for high-speed connectivity. However, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the digital divide, causing a surge in demand for online educational content. As a result, the Foundation saw an increase in downloads and updates, leading to a spike in egress costs. Their existing content delivery network (CDN) was unable to provide efficient solutions, and they were experiencing CDN dead zones in regions like Southeast Asia, Central, and South America, where they have a significant number of users. The quality of their service was inconsistent, and costs were continually increasing.

Filestack, a low code content API platform, was facing challenges in scaling their rapidly growing file management service. They were in need of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that could support their expanding services in a reliable, cost-effective, and fast manner. Their service involved image transformation, which resulted in multiple versions of the same file, and they needed a way to invalidate these versions quickly. They also required customization at the edge, a large number of powerful and strategically located Points of Presence (POPs), and the ability to handle large file sizes. Additionally, Filestack was struggling with the management of Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates, a task that was distracting their team from product development. They were also considering dropping a premium feature, CNAME, due to the burden of managing a certificate and private key for each customer.

Discovery Limited, a South Africa-based financial services group, faced a significant challenge as it expanded into a large corporation. The company, which specializes in banking, insurance, healthcare, wellness, and investments, required greater scalability and computing capacity to support its growth. Additionally, Discovery Limited aimed to expand its customer base and develop a new solution to monitor customers' health and inspire better lifestyle behaviors. However, the company needed a reliable partner to help them migrate to AWS and develop this new product. Another major challenge was related to data management. The data, which was stored and processed on-premises, needed a centralized and unified approach for effective governance, storage, organization, and accessibility.

Trade Me, New Zealand’s largest auction and classifieds site, faced a significant challenge during its digital transformation. The company, which has been in eCommerce since 1999, initially relied on New Zealand-based data centres in Auckland and Wellington. However, these centres required manual processes for configuration and maintenance, which were cumbersome and inefficient. The company decided to transition to the public cloud for scalability and automation benefits. However, this move presented its own set of challenges. The majority of Trade Me's customers are based in New Zealand, but the nearest Google Cloud servers were in Sydney, Australia, over 2,000km away. This distance posed potential issues for content delivery speed and customer experience. Additionally, the cloud migration raised new security and reliability challenges. For instance, if international connectivity was impacted by network failure or cyberattacks, the company could still serve domestic customer traffic with their New Zealand servers. However, this would not be possible with the cloud servers located in Australia.

The Weather Company, a premier provider of accurate weather forecasts, insights, and alerts, serves over 400 million monthly active users worldwide. The company's primary challenge is managing the scale and volume of its user base, which peaks during severe weather events such as hurricanes or winter storms. The company needed a robust configuration, setup, and technology to support its users, particularly in delivering video technology and handling hundreds of millions of requests daily. These requests are crucial as users rely on them to make quick decisions during severe weather conditions.

ABN AMRO, a leading bank in the Netherlands, was facing significant challenges with its data management and analytics. Data is central to ABN AMRO's strategies, including improving customer experience and optimizing compliance and regulatory processes. However, fulfilling data requirements for business users was a slow process, often taking up to two days. This delay was further exacerbated as the bank dealt with new and more complex data. The bank's data architecture was underpinned by an outsourced data center (IBM) and legacy tooling (SAS/Informatica), which were costly, inflexible, and not conducive to agile analytics. ABN AMRO recognized that its ambitious analytics goals were not aligned with its existing data technology.

Adidas was facing a challenge with the repetitive task of updating PowerPoint presentations with new data. The process involved downloading data from a database, storing it in Excel, and manually copying and pasting it into PowerPoint. This process was not only tedious but also prone to errors. The company was looking for a solution that could automate this process, saving time and reducing the possibility of errors.

The Medicare Marketing department at an American health insurance company was facing a significant challenge due to the lack of a data solution for pulling and outputting non-mandated marketing campaign data, particularly for email campaigns to existing Medicare members. The company had no CRM tool or database, and the data source systems operated in silos, making it difficult to access and consolidate data for campaign creation. The company was primarily focused on acquisition efforts, with no retention efforts in place. The goal was to start promoting electronic communications as a cost-saving initiative and to begin dialoguing with members outside of the CMS mandated materials. The department was tasked with collecting data from these communications to give to vendors for message delivery and trend reporting.

Amway, a multi-level-marketing company, manufactures over 450 different nutrition, beauty, personal care, and home products. Each of these products needs to be meticulously categorized and organized in its product hierarchy. The hierarchy requires daily updates as categories expand, business lines evolve, and new products develop. However, Amway’s original desktop-based model was complex and required numerous manual updates, proving itself slow and unsustainable. Amway attempted to smooth out some of these issues by switching to a virtualization solution, but the solution’s SQL-based transformations required too much involvement from the engineering team. Analysts and engineers had to communicate back and forth about data requirements until, days later, the outcome produced was as expected. Neither solution allowed for flexibility nor agile changes to the product hierarchy.

Anglo American, one of the world's largest mining companies, found itself grappling with a complex data estate and an outdated database solution. The company uses a variety of systems and tools, which made working with data on a day-to-day basis challenging. The company needed to perform more frequent and detailed internal audits, ethical business conduct reviews, risk management activities, investigations, and more. However, the wide range of data sources and audits to produce, different data types, levels of granularity, and output formats often made bringing datasets together a challenge. Anglo American needed a solution that would allow the team to cleanse and match data more effectively, with automation to help analysts cover more scope than with manual audits.

Anthony Nolan, a British cancer charity, was faced with the challenge of accelerating the donor registration process and using data insights to strengthen their work. The organization was dealing with disparate data elements from their data lake to onboard potential lifesaving donors onto the stem cell register. This process was time-consuming and relied heavily on Excel, taking hours each month. The organization was also dealing with growing datasets and ensuring regulatory compliance. The original team of four business analysts at Anthony Nolan were working in an environment lacking in data quality management and governance, which made it almost impossible to derive actionable insights. They were divorced from the data sources and lacked analytic tools such as stats packages and visualization tools. They could produce very little reporting and no true insight.