General IT support handles the email and the laptops well enough. It has no opinion about where your model lives, and no answer when a client contract starts asking security questions.
Design and construction work stresses technology in ways an accounting practice never will. Open any row for what it looks like in practice. No published benchmark covers architecture and engineering firms. We built one from the nearest sectors and show the working.
Model files that punish slow storage
Central models, linked files and point clouds behave differently from ordinary office documents. When a Revit central file takes four minutes to sync, the cause is usually storage or the network underneath it. That costs a project team an hour a day.
Coordination with people outside your firm
Consultants, contractors and owners each need access to some of your files and none of the rest. Shared folders that grow by accident are the most common way a firm loses control of its drawings. Cleaning that up later is a project of its own.
Jobsite connectivity that belongs to nobody
Trailers, temporary offices and field tablets get improvised per project, usually by whoever is closest. Nobody owns it, so nothing carries over and the next job spends the same week again.
Software that has to perform, not just run
AutoCAD, Revit, SolidWorks, Bluebeam, Civil 3D and Procore each stress a different part of the machine. Size a workstation for general office work and you end up with expensive hardware that still feels slow.
Security requirements arriving through client contracts
Public agencies and larger clients now attach security terms to the contract. The questions look very like a cyber insurance application, they arrive with a deadline, and the person who has to answer them is usually a principal, not an IT manager.
Professional liability, and now AI
Carriers have started asking how AI is used in the practice. A deliverable produced with AI assistance raises questions a policy written three years ago did not anticipate, and the answer needs to be written down before anyone asks.
Staffing that moves with the project
Headcount rises and falls with the work. Licensing, onboarding and offboarding at project speed is a different problem from steady-state IT, and it is where firms quietly overpay for seats nobody uses.
Project archives that have to outlive the project
A latent defect claim in California can arrive up to ten years after substantial completion, and the model, the markups and the correspondence all have to be retrievable when it does. Archives keep growing and cost money to hold, and nobody tests retrieval until somebody needs a 2016 file in a hurry.
By discipline
Where each discipline gets stuck
The shared problems are above. These are the pages for what is specific to each.
Architecture
Revit and Bluebeam file behavior, coordination workflows, and liability carrier questions.
What every AEC firm gets, whichever discipline you are
The discipline pages cover what is specific to a model, a vault or a jobsite. These three do not change between them, and they carry more of the risk than anything discipline-specific does.
Backups that include the working files
Not just the server, and not just email. The models, the vault, the markups and the site photographs, with one copy your own administrator credentials cannot delete, and a restore somebody has completed and timed. Until that has been done once, your recovery time is a guess. Ransomware and recovery.
Somebody watching while the office is empty
Encryption gets deployed at two in the morning and over long weekends, because that is when nobody is looking. Overnight alerts land with the security shift rather than a voicemail box, every night of the year. How the monitoring works.
A named adviser who answers the questionnaire
Client security exhibits, prequalification forms and insurance applications all arrive with a deadline. The same person handles yours every time, knows the environment, and answers from what is already documented rather than going away to find out. Cyber insurance readiness.
Then the part that is yours alone
Workstations and a model home Autodesk supports for architecture. A vault run as a database and licensing that survives a failure for engineering. Connectivity that moves with the trailer and payment-fraud controls for construction. Each of those is on its own page above.
The same four questions
Who can open your drawings, and what happens to them when the job ends
Architecture, engineering and construction answer this differently in the detail, and identically in the shape. Four questions decide whether a set of drawings stays inside the firm.
Who can check out what
A vault gives a drawing one owner while somebody has it open. The permissions behind it are what goes stale, because they get set once at install and the firm keeps hiring. The question worth asking is who could check out a sheet this afternoon, and whether anyone would know.
What closing a job actually involves
How long you keep the set is covered above. This is the other half: freezing the vault at a known state, recording who keeps read access, and putting the archive where the next storage migration cannot strand it. A job nobody formally closed stays open in your permissions for years.
When somebody leaves and the drawings go with them
Most drawings that leave a firm go with a departing employee, and almost never through anything dramatic. A project folder synced to a personal laptop before a last day, or a vendor login tied to a person and not an account. What you need is to say later, in writing, what they reached.
Why Civil 3D does not belong in a sync folder
Autodesk does not support third-party cloud storage for Civil 3D. Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive rename and relocate files underneath the program, which breaks data shortcuts and leaves a project pointing at paths that moved. That position is Autodesk’s own. If your civil team works out of a sync folder, move it first. What Autodesk and Dassault publish
Proof, not promises
9 to 1
Dean Lewis Associates: nine servers consolidated to one, saving 25 to 30 thousand dollars a year.
11 to 2
V&A Consulting Engineers: eleven servers consolidated to two with the files moved into Egnyte, saving tens of thousands across hardware, maintenance and monitoring, backup and downtime.
Do you support Revit, Bluebeam and Procore specifically?
Yes, by name. Central file sync, linked models, worksharing, Bluebeam Studio sessions and Procore integrations each behave differently on the network, and a slow model and a slow Studio session usually have different causes. We size and tune for the software you run.
Our consultants need access to our files. How do you handle that without opening everything?
External access is scoped per project and reviewed when the project closes. Most firms we meet have shared folders that outlived the job that created them. Tightening that is usually where we start, and it is also what a client security exhibit asks about first.
Can you set up IT for a jobsite trailer?
Yes, and we build it as a repeatable pattern, so the second job takes a day instead of a week. Connectivity, printing, device enrollment and the teardown are all part of it.
Our client contract has a security exhibit. Can you answer it?
Yes. We read the exhibit, test what it asks for, then close the gaps we can before the deadline and give you dated evidence to attach. It is the same work as a cyber insurance renewal, and it usually satisfies both at once.
Where do you work?
Yes. We support firms across the country, and we are deepest where we have been longest: Northern California, Portland and Vancouver Washington. Multi-office practices are a good fit, because the usual problem is making the offices behave like one firm.
Do we have to move everything to the cloud?
Usually yes, and we move more of it than most firms expect. For large model files we most often land on Egnyte, which is built for this problem and handles the file sizes and sync behavior that general purpose cloud storage does not. We still decide workload by workload, because a few still run better close to the team that works in them every day.
Got a project starting?
Fifteen minutes is usually enough to tell you where your setup will slow the team down.
