Zeroseven win Best Cloud Solution at the 2026 Umbraco Awards

On 10 June, on stage at Codegarden in Denmark, Icon Group's new platform was named winner of Best Cloud Solution at the 2026 Umbraco Awards. The awards celebrate the best work built with Umbraco, the open-source CMS used on hundreds of thousands of sites worldwide, and the cloud category recognises the projects that get the most out of Umbraco Cloud.

As the project manager on the Icon Group build, I had a close-up view of how much engineering sits beneath one simple idea: that adding a new website should be routine, not a project. I'm proud of this one. The achievement is structural rather than visual. We built a single cloud foundation that lets one of the world's largest cancer care providers grow its digital presence as fast as it grows its network of care.

The problem: one organisation, fifteen-plus websites

Icon Group delivers cancer care across seven countries, with more than 40 cancer centres in Australia alone. Their growth runs on acquisition, joint venture and partnership, and every new region carries a digital requirement. Each time the network expands, a new website has to follow quickly: on brand, compliant, and built to the standard patients expect.

The old setup had no real answer for that. Icon Group's digital estate had grown into 15+ separate WordPress sites, each with its own hosting, plugins and maintenance. Every site drifted a little further from brand standards with each update. Improvements made on one site stayed on that site. And for a healthcare organisation handling patient information across seven jurisdictions, each with its own privacy and data sovereignty rules, a fragmented estate wasn't only a maintenance headache. It was organisational risk.

The brief was to make rapid, repeatable, compliant site launches a solved problem.

[A unified multi-site platform image]

The solution: one foundation, many sites

We built a multi-site architecture on Umbraco Cloud. At its centre sits a shared foundation of document types, templates and content blocks. Every regional site is its own distinct site, but each is built from that same foundation.

When a new region joins the network, a site is provisioned from the shared base. There's no bespoke build and no heavy developer involvement. This is the part the Umbraco jury singled out: the project won, in their words, for its masterclass use of Baselines to instantly spin up new regional websites. Baselines is the Umbraco Cloud feature that lets a parent solution seed new child sites, and it's exactly what turns "launch another regional website" from a project into a routine.

From there, regional teams take over. Theming is applied directly in the CMS through a toggle system built around three core brand themes, so a local team can brand their site without a developer and without touching the underlying architecture. The guardrails that keep everything on-brand are enforced at the platform level, not policed through a review process after the fact.

[centralised governance image]

How it works: enterprise plumbing, handled

A multi-site platform for a global healthcare provider only works if the infrastructure underneath it is genuinely enterprise grade. Umbraco Cloud gave us the pieces to make that real:

• Structured environments: A stable preview, UAT and production workflow runs across the whole portfolio, giving proper environment separation and release governance rather than ad-hoc updates per site.
• CI/CD: Deployments are fast and repeatable, which supports both our development workflow and client collaboration during delivery.
• Enterprise identity: External Login Providers integrate with Icon Group's Microsoft Entra tenancy, so staff sign in with their corporate credentials under existing account policies.
• Secret management: Sensitive application configuration is stored securely rather than scattered through the codebase.
• Hostname monitoring: The team has visibility over uptime and response times across every site in the portfolio.
• Data sovereignty per market: Controls are configured market by market, which is what lets one platform operate compliantly across seven jurisdictions at once.

No single one of these is the headline. The point is the combination: governance, identity, security and sovereignty working together so the business can acquire or partner without commissioning a fresh development engagement every time.

[cloud driven deployment workflow image]

Built for a global content team

The real test of a platform like this is whether the people using it every day feel empowered or boxed in. The Backoffice was designed for a global marketing team running multiple brands from a single instance.

Editors work from a shared repository of structured content blocks, which cuts duplication and keeps the portfolio consistent. The Centre and Doctor finder gives editors direct control over location data shown on an interactive map, with no technical overhead. On a per-centre basis, charts display aggregate wait times for patients to start chemotherapy, pulling from a single integrated source that any centre can use. Custom multistep forms integrate with SharePoint and are managed editorially.

And because Icon operates across markets with real linguistic differences, multi-language and translation workflows are built into the platform. Regional teams can localise content, including terminology that genuinely differs between markets. A clinician is a "Doctor" in Australia and a "Consultant" in the UK, and the platform handles that without fragmenting the architecture underneath.

[backoffice for global teams image]

The impact

The clearest measure of success is the pipeline. Three sites are live, two are in content preparation and review, and more than ten are queued. Every one of them comes from the same shared foundation. No bespoke build, no development bottleneck.

Brand consistency, which was effectively impossible to enforce across a decentralised estate, is now guaranteed at the platform level. Regional teams have real autonomy inside guardrails that hold. Marketing operates the theming; editors manage content, localisation and translation. And improvements now scale: a fix or enhancement is built once and applies everywhere, where it used to mean repeating the same work across dozens of environments.

Icon Group can now enter a new market, onboard an acquisition or launch a new brand faster and with more confidence than at any point in their history. The platform grows with them.

What the jury said

The Umbraco Awards jury described the project as a premier example of enterprise-level cloud transformation, praising how fully it used Umbraco Cloud and the architecture built for rapid global deployment. Coming from the people who build the platform, that's the recognition we value most.

It's also our second time on the Umbraco Awards stage. Back in 2021 we became the first Australian agency to win, for our work with the not-for-profit GIVIT. Different project, same belief: that a well-built CMS should make ambitious things straightforward.

View the websites

With a few sites already published, you can check out the winning material here

• iconcancercentre.com.au
• boweniconcancercentre.co.nz
• icononcology.com.my
• iconcancercentre.id
• iconcancercentre.co.uk