DWG P-02 · Case study

A business stack we run ourselves

HLLMR runs its mail, files, documents, automation and products on infrastructure it controls, instead of renting each one by the seat. AI agents do much of the operating work. A person approves every change.

Why run it ourselves

Per-seat cloud suites are convenient until the business wants to know where its data lives, what happens when an account is locked, or what the fifth year costs. Running the stack on owned and leased hardware trades that convenience for control. The catch is operating work, which used to need a team. That is the work the agents do.

How it is operated

Every operating agent has a written role. An infrastructure agent owns the infrastructure code and performs changes. An advisory agent reviews plans and reports but changes nothing. Application agents own their own services. All of them work in branches and pull requests. Nothing merges, and nothing changes in production, until the owner authorizes that specific change in writing.

Decisions are kept as numbered decision records on the day they are made, with the options that were turned down. Each change to a running service has a request record that says what will change, how it rolls back and what was verified afterwards.

Recovery is proven, not assumed

A backup that has never been restored is an assumption. Backups are encrypted and stored off the host they protect. Restores are drilled into isolated machines and the result is written down, including what the drill did not cover. Virtual machines replicate to a recovery site in a second country. Storage is scrubbed on a schedule, and a missed scrub raises an alert instead of passing silently. The keys needed to read the backups are held in escrow, and the escrow itself is checked.

Defaults that stay off

Every system that could send mail or messages is off by default and turned on only by a recorded decision. This website sends nothing. A contact link opens your own mail program, and no form on this site stores or forwards anything.

What it shows

  • Agents can carry real operating load when the work is bounded, recorded and approved.
  • Owning the infrastructure is practical for a small business once the operating discipline is written down.
  • The same method we would bring to a client's systems, tested on our own first.

Limits, stated plainly

This is our own infrastructure, described at a high level on purpose; we do not publish its layout. Full bare-metal recovery and restoring from outside the estate have not yet been proven end to end, and we say so in our own records too.