An engineering practice’s IT works as hard as the practice does
Heavy CAD and BIM files, rendering, projects involving clients, contractors and outside collaborators, tender documentation, continuous revisions: an engineering or architecture practice asks its IT for performance, order and security. Xion IT Group designs the infrastructure that carries this work — and maintains it over time.
What we do for architecture and engineering firms
- Workstations and networks sized for CAD, BIM and rendering;
- Cloud and secure external file sharing, without improvised services (Cloud & Remote);
- Project backup and disaster recovery — automatic, encrypted, off site (XRB);
- Project portals — documents, revisions and approvals shared with clients and contractors;
- Automation and AI — searching regulations and specifications, classifying documents, drafting recurring reports;
- Cybersecurity and access control — multi-factor authentication, endpoint protection and management of outside collaborators;
- Ongoing support with remote assistance and on-site visits.
Where to start
A review of the infrastructure: network, storage, backup and sharing flows. In one visit — free — we establish where the practice is losing time and where it risks losing work.
Heavy files and collaboration: the daily challenge
An architecture or engineering practice works with files that overwhelm infrastructure designed for an ordinary office: BIM models, CAD drawings, renders, point clouds. Opening them over the network has to be fast, sharing them with clients and contractors has to be secure, and every revision has to stay traceable so the last good version does not disappear into a sea of “final_2_rev_definitive”. That requires correctly sized networks, adequate storage and versioning rules — not a shared disk left to chaos. Xion designs the practice’s working environment around these real workloads.
Every project is an asset worth protecting
For an engineering practice, the projects are capital accumulated over years of work: losing them to a failure, a theft or ransomware means losing the practice’s own memory. Yet it is common to find improvised backups, never tested, sitting on the same disk they are supposed to protect. XRB off-site backup puts the projects somewhere safe, encrypted and with multiple versions, with periodic restore testing. And for working with outside parties, a project portal replaces email and temporary links with a controlled space where client, studio and contractors share documents and revisions in order.
Big files, long archives, outside collaborators
An engineering practice’s IT has three characteristics that make it different from an office’s, and all three weigh on the network before they weigh on the computers.
The files are large and are opened over the network. A three-dimensional model or a heavy drawing is not downloaded: it is worked on where it sits. That makes the local network the most frequent bottleneck, and explains why a practice with new computers can still work slowly. In most cases the problem is not the power of the machines but the backbone connecting them.
The archive is never thrown away. A project from fifteen years ago may be needed for a variation, a dispute or a refurbishment. The archive grows and does not compress, and it has to be designed to grow rather than being moved from disk to disk every three years.
Work involves people outside the practice. Contractors, other professionals, clients: somebody has to receive and return heavy files. When there is no simple and secure way of doing that, people fall back on personal services, and at that point project documents live somewhere the practice does not control.
What we find in engineering practices
- The project archive on a network disk bought to make room, never treated as a system to protect and often outside the backups.
- Local copies on the designers’ own computers, which have meanwhile become the most up-to-date version of something.
- No version control. Folders called “final”, “final 2”, “final good”: it works as long as one person is doing the work.
- Licences tied to one machine, which become a problem the day that machine fails.
- Files shared externally through personal services, with no expiry and no traceability.
The slowness, explained
It is the number one complaint and it almost always has the same cause. When a heavy file is opened from a network folder, the time it takes depends on three things in sequence: the speed of the disk it sits on, the speed of the network carrying it, and the computer’s ability to handle it. Replacing the computer addresses only the third, which is why a practice that renews its workstations often does not see the improvement it expected.
The right order of investigation is the reverse: first measure the network — and in most practices the backbone is still the one installed when files weighed a tenth as much — then look at where the archive sits, and only at the end at the machines.
Where we work
Xion IT Group has its head office in Milan and offices in Lecco and Bergamo, and works with architecture and engineering practices across Lombardy, including those working on projects for international clients.