2020 Review: The Top IT Challenges of AEC Businesses

2020 has been a complicated year for the world, forcing companies and professionals to go out of their comfort zones and digitalize their operations. Like many others, AEC businesses, too, have felt the need to adjust to a new landscape, while turning challenges into opportunities.

Businesses prioritize security, intelligence, the capacity to work remotely and agility.

At AECCloud, working with small, medium and large organizations in architecture, engineering and construction, we manage to have a good, 360 degrees perspective on these industries and, thus, understand their needs and identify trends at an early stage.

By analyzing inquiries and talking to our prospects and clients, we identified the top 4 IT challenges for AEC companies. We decided to share them with you in this blog post, together with some of our views on how to approach them and the solutions we have proposed to different businesses around the world.

The overall view

While some may be very specific on what their companies require, most of the prospects we meet are looking for a provider that helps them assess their organization’s flows, apps and needs, to recommend the best solutions and a deployment plan that is carefully strategized and split into steps.

This means that they are quite open to discussions and that they count on our expertise and know how to look after their interests, as well as create custom, cost-effective plans that deliver.

When we talk to prospects, we start from the tangible objectives they have - such as more flexibility, so that people work remotely, or data security etc. - and we classify their problems into a major category, like on-premise infrastructure, software / applications, human resources / IT.

Once we do this, we start following the red thread, to see exactly what are the priorities and, afterwards, we propose what we consider the best approach and plan. Once these get accepted we find, create and build the solutions, ensuring full implementation.

Challenge #1: Remote work

The ability to work remotely has been important for AEC businesses long before the pandemic, as, often, different types of professionals that are involved in a project need to access documentation from different terminals and places. Still, since the COVID-19 crisis started, companies have needed to adopt a more digital-oriented approach. According to Statista, before the pandemic, 17% of US employees worked from home for 5 or more days per week, while, after the coronavirus struck, this percentage increased to 44. Moreover, as Gallop shows, nearly ⅔ of the employees that have been working from home would like to continue so even after.

Working remotely means lowers costs for companies. In order to be deployed correctly and effectively, it requires virtual machines that create virtualized environments and clone actual devices, so that the clone behaves like a different computer system that has the hardware devices of the aforementioned one. This enables users to access their PCs remotely, over a network, on another physical device.

Most companies start off with a trial, to see how their organization responds to the change, and require a quick, effective implementation. This is why, we, at AEC Cloud, need to know what the main software systems used in the company are, analyze the needs, offer the solution and prepare for scaling up. For best results, we leverage Remote Desktop Services or Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop, a desktop and app virtualization service that runs on the cloud and which is compatible with Windows Desktop, web, macOS, iOS, Android and Microsoft Store Client.

We did a similar project for a construction client that required 20 VMs for its engineering team that used mainly Autodesk Revit and, which, in a short interval of time, after testing the solution, wanted to expand to 60 virtual machines.

Challenge #2: Moving applications that run in-house to the cloud

Many AEC clients come to us wanting to move their apps from in-house servers to the cloud, as part of their digital transformation journeys or to respond to their need to update and replace the existing infrastructure and technology.

The more common out of the two is business transformation. Companies often have legacy IT systems, like custom ERP, CRM or CPQ systems that no longer respond to modern business needs and processes and, thus, require scaling, performance and complex data migration.

These legacy apps often run on outdated server environments, like Windows 2009 / SQL etc. When they are not supported by the vendor for upgrades and are not made compatible with later versions of the server model, replacing them with modern business apps that run in the cloud is recommendable and AEC Cloud performs this transition smoothly and effectively.

On the other side, custom applications may require rearchitecting and refactoring in order to run in a cloud environment. At AEC Cloud, we analyze the reasons for migration and, when these justify the process, we involve the proper team, made from team developers and system engineers, to do the job.

Challenge #3: Implementing hybrid cloud models

Different clients have different needs and it is our job, at AEC Cloud, to identify them. Sometimes, when the situation requires, we help our clients implement a hybrid cloud model, which refers to a mixed environment that includes on-premise infrastructure, private and public cloud services, like Microsoft Azure.

The advantages of such a model are diverse, but the most important, praised by business units, is agility, a competitive advantage that helps companies differentiate themselves.

One of the many businesses for which we proposed a hybrid cloud model was a design, engineering and manufacturing company with multiple locations, across the US. All their sites were connected through a VPN, but the problem was their Distributed File System (DFS) that crashed and, which, for a long time, was unavailable to use. In order to solve the issue, we recommended moving this to the cloud and, thus, implemented a hybrid model.

Challenge #4: Security

One of the most common reasons for moving to the cloud is security and disaster recovery.

When data and applications are kept behind firewalls and are accessible only to members of your company, based on different access levels, sensitive information is better stored and processed, which increases your security level.

Moreover, recovering information, apps and systems or transferring them from one data center to another is faster and more cost-effective than in non-virtualized approaches.

One of our clients, a mechanical engineering firm, was using as primary apps Autocad, McExchange, Quickbooks and Revit. In order to access the information, associates needed to access their office workstations using LogMeIn, a remote work tool, and use iBack, for local backup. The process was not only complicated, but unsafe. Working with them and identifying their working needs, we transitioned the company to a cloud model which offered more security and protected them against disaster.

Conclusions

Each company in the AEC industry has different needs and works with a different set of apps, but the overall goals and challenges are similar. Businesses prioritize security, intelligence, the capacity to work remotely and agility. In order to attain these, we, at AEC Cloud, analyse the premise, the business flows and develop the best strategies to respond to them and deliver. Contact us and let’s talk about your project.