According to a recent article on INC.com, the future of business belongs to those who don’t wait to create. Although this is true for all industries, architecture, engineering, and construction firms’ opportunities to digitize their workflows have never been more critical.
With the world being thrown into a pandemic, AEC firms are suddenly presented with an extensive range of challenges. The immediate is getting people working from home access to resources like they have in the office. Some firms were already using Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions, on-premise and in the cloud, and some responded by scaling up capacity.
Given that firms need to maintain tight control over data, the norm has been to keep the data within their brick and mortar locations with on-premise servers.
We spoke to one LucidLink customer, Torti Gallas + Partners, regarding their experience with COVID and remote workers.
“The biggest thing for us was getting people access to programs and the data they needed,” said Omer Mushahwar, Director of Information Technology. “We shifted all the Autodesk workload on Bim360, and basically, everything else was done through VPN – which for architecture files is a pain, because the files are so large. If there are 100 people connected to a 100MB or Gig circuit they are going to eat it up real fast. It slows access down a lot.”
LucidLink’s cloud-native NAS solution solves the problem of distance and latency in cloud environments by dramatically boosting responsiveness; we enable file data to be delivered efficiently and streamed on-demand.
For an industry historically underserved by technology, AEC companies now have the opportunity to take innovative steps into technology-enabled teams and processes.
Torti Gallas has offices across the United States from Washington D.C. and Los Angeles, California, and a Liaison Office in Istanbul, Turkey. Like many global firms, communication and collaboration are key to a productive workflow. Architects and designers, accustomed to collaborating on projects, use LucidLink Filespaces to quickly work together on design models directly out of the cloud. Architects use all the AEC tools that they are accustomed to such as AutoDesk AEC Collection, including Infraworks, Navisworks Manage, Civil 3D, AutoCAD, and Revit, as well as Adobe and Office products and Sketchup.
Since LucidLink works with any cloud storage, multiple users access data concurrently from one centralized location in the cloud, the single source of truth. AEC firms can take advantage of innovation and accelerate their design processes and optimize production workflows. Using LucidLink, there is no longer a need to set up on-site servers, access content via VPN, use FTP, or other 3rd party file transfer services.
When your industry has been hit hard and turned on its head, business leaders need to act decisively, creatively and drive innovation to remain competitive. With LucidLink, organizations gain the cost benefits of cloud storage while retaining the performance of on-premises network-attached storage through an inventive Cloud NAS solution.
SaaS offering, no hardware or IT support required
End-to-end security encryption
Works with any object storage
Instant on-demand file access from anywhere
Works with any OS