Delaware North is one of the largest privately owned and operated hospitality and entertainment companies in the world.

The Challenge

Daemon faced a significant challenge when tasked with supporting the creation of the first Just Walk Out (JWO) implementation at the Australian Football League's (AFL) Marvel Stadium. Our objective was to seamlessly integrate this innovative technology into the stadium's operations. However, before embarking on this journey, it was imperative to establish a robust foundation on AWS to accommodate future growth effectively.

Our initial focus was on creating an AWS Landing Zone tailored for Delaware North, the stadium's management company. This strategic move aimed to provide numerous benefits, including the establishment of a secure, AWS Well Architected, and scalable environment on AWS. Our goal was to ensure seamless scalability for future requirements while minimising friction in achieving this objective.

The primary challenge lay in executing this implementation swiftly to align with Delaware North's tight deadline for the overall JWO solution deployment.

The Solution

Daemon successfully leveraged AWS Control Tower to establish a secure landing zone tailored for Delaware North, the management entity overseeing Marvel Stadium. This initiative aimed to lay a robust foundation for a secure, scalable, and efficient cloud environment on AWS, enabling Delaware North to harness the full potential of AWS while ensuring compliance with best practices.

The benefits of this well-designed AWS Landing Zone are multifaceted:

Security: Implementing security best practices and standards across the AWS environment is paramount. The Landing Zone facilitated the establishment of a secure baseline configuration encompassing identity and access management (IAM), security, logging, and monitoring.

Governance: The Landing Zone ensures compliance with organisational standards and regulatory requirements by implementing policies and governance controls. Centralised resource management, cost tracking, and auditing capabilities are instrumental in maintaining adherence to internal and external regulations.


Scalability: The foundation established by the Landing Zone was designed to seamlessly scale with Delaware North's business needs. Automated provisioning of resources and infrastructure simplified the accommodation of growth and changes in demand.


Operational Efficiency: Automation of setup and configuration processes within the Landing Zone reduces manual intervention, thereby enhancing operational efficiency.


Consistency: The Landing Zone promotes consistency in architecture and deployment practices across multiple AWS accounts and regions. Standardised configurations mitigated the risk of configuration drift or divergence over time.


Cost Optimisation: Implementing cost management and optimization practices within the Landing Zone provides better visibility into AWS spending. This enables us to optimise resource utilisation and implement cost controls to prevent unexpected expenses.


Resilience: A well-architected Landing Zone enhances the resilience and fault tolerance of Delaware North's AWS environment. Leveraging AWS services such as multiple Availability Zones.

Daemon has extensive experience in building secure landing zones for our customers. We utilised our expertise to implement the necessary security and compliance controls using AWS Control Tower, including multi-factor authentication, guardrails, and security tools, including AWS Security Hub, and AWS GuardDuty.

To implement the Landing Zone, Daemon's design used the following AWS services:

• AWS Control Tower: to set up the multi-account environment, security and compliance controls, and landing zone.
• AWS Organizations: to create and manage the accounts within the Landing Zone.
• AWS Service Catalog: to provision products and services in a controlled manner.
• AWS SSO: to provide a centralised and managed single sign-on experience for Delaware users.
• AWS Account Factory: to automate the creation of new accounts and the deployment of the landing zone in the new accounts.

Daemon designed a micro-segmentation based scalable AWS account structure that improved security by containing an application's 'blast radius' within a single account. Additional account customisations were implemented using an Infrastructure-as-Code pipeline using Terraform, which streamlined the process of making infrastructure changes to multiple accounts.

The Outcome

Daemon's implementation of AWS Control Tower and the associated services has provided Delaware North with a secure and compliant landing zone that meets its business requirements. Delaware can continue to move additional workloads in the future, knowing that the landing zone provides a secure and compliant foundation for their cloud journey.



This allowed our engineering teams to focus on building out the JWO architecture, which you can see more details on within this case study.  

Daemon continues to work closely with Delaware North to manage and maintain this cloud environment as part of our Cloud Ops service we provide at Daemon.