IT for Engineering and Architecture Firms: Big Files, Fast Machines, No Lost Work

A structural engineer opens a model and goes to make a coffee while it loads. A graduate architect saves over a detail sheet a colleague spent yesterday afternoon on, because both were working from copies in different folders. Someone tries to email a 400MB drawing set to a council and it bounces, so it goes on a USB stick in the post instead.

None of that is a technology emergency. Nothing is down, nobody has been hacked, and the IT would pass a basic health check. It is a practice paying for its setup in ten minute increments, several times a day, across every person who bills by the hour.

A setup that is perfectly adequate for a firm running email and spreadsheets will fail a firm running Revit and ArchiCAD, and it fails in ways that show up on the timesheet before they show up on a monitoring dashboard.

This guide covers what IT for engineering firms has to deliver: why generic hardware is the wrong purchase, how to stop version conflicts becoming rework, and what to do with project records once the job is done.

Why Is IT for Engineering Firms Different From Office IT?

Most professional offices push a few megabytes around. A design office pushes a few gigabytes around, repeatedly, all day. That single difference sets the requirement for the machines, the network, the storage, and the archive.

The demands of IT for engineering firms are different in kind. Files run to hundreds of megabytes or several gigabytes, the software is heavy on graphics and memory, several people edit the same model at once, and the finished job has to be retrievable years later.

What does it cost when the setup is wrong?

The cost shows up as delay, and you can work it out for your own practice. Time how long your largest model takes to open, count how often it is opened or saved, and multiply across your technical staff. Most principals who do that arithmetic are unpleasantly surprised. None of it appeared on a support ticket, because nothing was broken.

Version conflicts are the more expensive failure. When a drawing is overwritten the work is redone at the firm’s expense, the programme slips, and if the wrong revision reaches a contractor you have a liability problem on top of a cost one. Practices treat these as isolated human error. They are usually a file setup that lets two people hold the same document open with no warning.

What Should a CAD and BIM Workstation Actually Have?

IT for engineering firms starts at the desk: a CAD or BIM workstation needs a fast multi-core processor, a professional graphics card, generous memory, and solid state storage, specified against the vendor’s published requirements for the version you run. Standard business laptops are built for browsers and documents, and they struggle with modelling within a year.

Workstation specification is the one place in IT for engineering firms where paying more returns the money, usually inside a year, in time technical staff do not spend waiting.

Where the money actually goes: memory and graphics

Memory is the setting most often specified too low, and the one that annoys us most, because it is the cheapest line on the quote to fix. Autodesk publishes its Revit requirements in three tiers, tied to the size of your model on disk rather than the size of your practice. As at the 2026 release: 16GB of RAM covers a model up to roughly 300MB, 32GB covers around 600MB, and 64GB once a model reaches about 1GB. Check the figures for the version you run, because they move with each release.

Most practices should be reading the middle and top rows. The number that matters is your largest central model, and if you link structural, services, and architectural models the machine holds all of them at once. Autodesk also asks for 100GB of free disk for temporary files, the requirement most often missed on a new build.

Graphics follow the same tiers at 4GB, 6GB, and 8GB of video memory. Professional cards are certified by the software vendors, which means driver problems get support instead of a shrug, and they take the work of redrawing the model on screen off the main processor. That is the difference between rotating a building smoothly and watching it stutter. For flat 2D drafting the requirement is lighter. For 3D modelling and clash detection, meaning the check that finds where the ducting runs through a beam before anyone builds it, it is not optional.

On processors Autodesk’s guidance is blunt and often ignored: the highest single core clock speed you can get beats a high core count, because much of the work in a model is still single-threaded.

Storage is the specification people think about last and notice most. Solid state drives change how quickly a large file opens, and on a machine opening them all day that is the working experience.

Standardise on two or three machines

Standardise. Two or three configurations covers most practices: a full workstation for modelling staff, a lighter machine for administration, and something portable for site visits. Buying whatever is on special the week someone starts creates a fleet nobody can support or budget for.

Those workstations also age faster than office machines because the software demands grow every release, so they belong in a planned refresh cycle rather than being replaced when they finally give up. Our guide to hardware lifecycle planning covers how to schedule and budget that renewal across a fleet.

Why Are Large Project Files So Hard on a Network?

Large project files are hard on a network because every open, save, and synchronise moves the entire file, including the parts that did not change. A gigabyte model opened over an ageing switch takes minutes, and that delay repeats for every person, every time.

This is where IT for engineering firms is punished for shortcuts other businesses never notice. An office running email and web applications can sit on old cabling indefinitely. A design office cannot.

Finding the actual bottleneck

The bottleneck is normally one of three things: the storage the files sit on, the network between the workstation and that storage, or the internet connection when files live in the cloud. Diagnosing which matters, because the three have different fixes and the expensive one is often unnecessary. We have talked practices out of a new server when the fault was a switch.

Local storage speed is the usual culprit in practices that have grown without reviewing infrastructure. The file server was sized for a smaller team and smaller projects, and it has become the thing everyone waits on. Cabling is next, particularly in older Christchurch and Dunedin buildings where the wiring predates the current tenant.

Should project files live locally or in the cloud?

In IT for engineering firms, storage location depends on the software and the size of the models. Some platforms are built for cloud-hosted project data. Others expect files on a local network and crawl when they are not there, however fast the connection is.

Our steer, and we will happily be argued out of it on a specific site: if you run Revit with worksharing, put the models on a fast local server and use the cloud for backup and external sharing. If the work is mostly 2D drafting and documents, cloud-first tends to hold up.

If you are considering Revit cloud worksharing, Autodesk publishes the connection it expects. Their tiers ask for a symmetrical 5, 10, or 25 Mbps per machine on burst transfers, meaning upload as well as download, for everyone working on the model at once. A connection that looks fine on a speed test falls short when six people synchronise at four o’clock. Either way, let the software decide it. Preferences about cloud are how practices end up with a setup that fights them daily.

Can technical staff model from home?

Remote modelling works when staff get a route to the files that does not involve copying them. Pulling a gigabyte model down a domestic connection is slow, and the copy on a home machine is one nobody else can see. The usual answer is to leave the files where they are and send the screen instead, through a remote session into an office workstation, so the office hardware does the work and there is still one authoritative set of files.

How Do You Stop Two People Overwriting the Same Drawing?

Overwrite conflicts are stopped by software that controls who holds a file open, not by a shared folder and good manners. Modelling platforms offer worksharing or check-out systems that let several people contribute to one project while preventing two of them from editing the same element at once.

A shared network folder does none of this. It will let two people open the same drawing, and the second to save wins. The first person’s afternoon is gone. Often nobody notices until a detail turns up missing on an issued sheet, by which point it has been to a contractor.

What does proper file control look like in a design office?

Proper file control in IT for engineering firms means one authoritative project location, a mechanism showing who holds each file, a history of what changed, and the ability to recover an earlier state. Practices running BIM get most of this from the modelling platform, provided it is set up properly and nobody has found a way around it.

Watch for the workaround. When staff keep personal copies on their desktops because the proper system is slow, the control is gone regardless of what the software can do. That is nearly always a performance or training failure wearing the costume of a discipline problem.

How should drawings be issued outside the practice?

Issued work should go out through a controlled transmittal: a defined package, named recipients, and a record of what went when. Email fails on size, and what staff reach for instead is worse. Personal file sharing accounts, USB drives, and consumer services keep no record.

Councils, contractors, and clients all need drawings at different stages, and every exchange is a point where the wrong revision can escape. Managed sharing with expiry dates and access logs solves the problem and creates the record.

What about surveying and point cloud data?

Surveying practices carry a storage problem an order of magnitude larger than a drawing office, and most IT setups are sized in ignorance of it. A single terrestrial laser scan station produces one to two gigabytes. A medium site across twenty to fifty stations lands between thirty and a hundred. Document a whole building and the project reaches hundreds of gigabytes, and large reality capture jobs pass a terabyte.

Three consequences follow. Storage has to be bought in terabytes and grown deliberately, not discovered when a drive fills mid-project. Raw scans can usually move to cheaper archive storage once the processed deliverable is signed off. And compression matters: aerial LiDAR held as LAZ takes roughly a tenth of the space of raw LAS, while dense terrestrial data compresses far less well.

What Happens to Project Records After Handover?

Project records need to survive long after the project finishes, because professional liability does not end at handover. A claim can arrive years after completion, and the practice’s defence rests on producing the drawings, calculations, and decisions as they stood at the time.

Archiving is the part of IT for engineering firms most often left to chance. The live project is looked after because people are in it daily. The finished one goes quiet, gets shifted off the main storage, and is not thought about again until a lawyer asks for it.

Is a backup the same as an archive?

No. A backup is a recent copy kept so the practice can recover from a failure, and most backup systems overwrite themselves on a cycle measured in weeks or months. An archive is a long-term store of completed work, indexed so it can be found, and kept for a defined period.

A practice relying on backup rotation to meet a long-term liability window will find, when the request comes, that the copy it needs was overwritten years ago. Both systems are needed. Our backup as a service guide covers the recovery half of that pair.

What to keep

At minimum: the issued drawing sets, the models as they stood at each issue, supporting calculations, the correspondence recording decisions, and the as-built information. The test is whether someone uninvolved could reconstruct what was designed and approved, years later.

How long to keep it is a question for the practice’s insurer and lawyer, not for its IT provider, because it depends on the liability periods that apply to the work. What IT can do is make sure that whatever period is decided is actually achievable, which means an archive built for the job. A folder called Old Projects on a drive nobody maintains is not one. Our guide to data retention policy covers how to set retention periods across the whole business and dispose of records properly once the period ends.

Why does generic professional-services IT advice not fit?

Most advice written for professional firms assumes the problem is protecting sensitive client information, because for a law or accounting practice it is. Applied to a design practice, that advice is aimed at the wrong target. A practice can have faultless security and still bleed hours every week into a slow server, because the binding constraint here is the weight of the files and what the software demands of the hardware. The confidentiality side still matters, and our guide to IT for professional services covers it.

If you run site work as well as design, the other half of the problem is getting drawings out to the field and information back. Our guide to IT for construction covers site connectivity and rugged devices.

What Should You Look for in an IT for Engineering Firms Provider?

Good IT for engineering firms starts with someone who has specified machines for modelling work, understands why file performance matters to a practice that bills by the hour, and can talk about archives as well as backups. A provider whose experience is entirely in ordinary offices gives ordinary office answers, and those answers produced the setup you have now. The usual one is selling you more internet when the problem is in your comms cabinet.

Worth asking before you sign anything: have you specified machines for CAD or BIM work, and against whose requirements? How would you diagnose a slow-opening model? What would you propose for long-term archives, and how is that different from the backup? Can you support the design software itself, or only the operating system underneath it?

The answers matter more than the brochure. So does whether they can get someone to your office, because slow machines, tired cabling, and failing storage are not fixed remotely.

Get the Machines and Files Right

Every minute waiting on a model, every hour redoing overwritten work, and every scramble to find a drawing from a project that finished years ago is capacity the practice has already paid for and does not get back.

Exodesk builds IT for engineering firms across Christchurch, Dunedin, and the wider South Island, working with engineering, architecture, and surveying practices. That means specifying workstations against what the software actually asks for, building storage and networks that move large project files at working speed, and archives that hold a project as long as the liability does. We have supported South Island businesses since 1989.

It comes as part of our managed IT services, so when the model is slow you make one call and nobody blames the cabling company.

Tell us how long your largest model takes to open and how many people are waiting on it, and we will tell you what that is costing you a year. No obligation to do anything about it. You can also connect with us on LinkedIn.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is IT for engineering firms?

Design practices depend on a technology setup built around the weight of their work. Machines have to run modelling packages without stalling, networks and storage have to move gigabyte project files quickly, access has to be controlled so concurrent edits cannot destroy each other, drawings have to leave the office through a channel that keeps a record, and finished jobs have to stay retrievable for years. Ordinary business IT is not built for any of that.

How much RAM does Revit need?

Autodesk publishes three tiers for Revit, tied to model size on disk. As at the 2026 release, 16GB suits a model up to roughly 300MB, 32GB suits around 600MB, and 64GB or higher is recommended once a model reaches about 1GB. Most practices doing coordinated BIM work should be specifying at the 32GB or 64GB level, sized against their largest central model. Confirm the figures for the version you run, as they change with each release.

What specification does a CAD workstation need?

A CAD workstation needs a fast multi-core processor, a professional graphics card, generous memory, and solid state storage. Autodesk asks for 4GB to 8GB of video memory depending on tier, 100GB of free disk space for temporary files, and gives priority to the highest single core clock speed available, because much modelling work remains single-threaded. Size the specification against your largest project, not your average one.

How much internet speed does Revit cloud worksharing need?

Autodesk specifies a symmetrical connection per machine on burst transfers: 5 Mbps minimum, 10 Mbps for balanced performance, and 25 Mbps for large or complex models. Symmetrical means upload as well as download, and the requirement applies per person working on the model concurrently. A connection that tests well can still fall short when several people synchronise at once.

Can architects use standard business laptops?

Standard business laptops are adequate for administration, email, and light 2D work, but they are a poor fit for modelling. Consumer and standard business machines typically lack the graphics capability and memory that BIM software needs, and they slow noticeably within a year as project files grow. Most practices standardise on a full workstation for technical staff and a lighter machine for everyone else.

Why do large project files open so slowly?

Slow opening usually points to one of three bottlenecks: the storage the files sit on, the network between the workstation and that storage, or the internet connection when files are held in the cloud. Identifying which one is responsible matters, because each has a different fix. Ageing file servers and old network cabling are the most common causes in practices that have grown without reviewing their infrastructure.

How do design practices prevent version conflicts?

Version conflicts are prevented by software that controls who holds a file open, not by a shared folder and staff discipline. Modelling platforms provide worksharing or check-out systems that allow several people to contribute to one project while preventing simultaneous edits to the same element. A plain network folder offers no such protection, and the second person to save overwrites the first.

How should drawings be sent to councils and contractors?

Drawings should be issued through a controlled transmittal that defines the package, names the recipients, and records what was sent and when. Email attachments usually fail on file size, and the informal alternatives staff turn to when email fails, such as personal file sharing accounts and USB drives, leave no record. A managed sharing platform with access logs and expiry dates solves both problems at once.

Is a backup the same as a project archive?

No. Backups and archives serve different purposes. A backup is a recent copy kept so the practice can recover from a failure, and it typically overwrites itself on a cycle of weeks or months. An archive is a long-term, indexed store of completed projects held for a defined period. A practice that relies on backup rotation to meet a multi-year liability window will find the copy it needs has long since been overwritten.

How long should engineering project records be kept?

Retention periods depend on the liability that attaches to the work, so the length should be confirmed with the practice’s insurer and lawyer, not decided by an IT provider. What the technology needs to guarantee is that whatever period is agreed can actually be met, which requires an archive built for the purpose and maintained deliberately.

What records should a practice keep after handover?

Practices should retain the issued drawing sets, the models as they stood at each issue, supporting calculations, correspondence that records decisions and instructions, and the as-built information provided at completion. A useful test is whether somebody uninvolved in the project could reconstruct what was designed, what was approved, and on what basis, several years after the fact.

Should project files be stored locally or in the cloud?

Storage location depends on the design software in use and the size of the models. Some platforms are built for cloud-hosted project data and perform well with it, while others expect files on a local network and are slow when they are not. Many practices adopt a hybrid, keeping active project data local for speed while using cloud services for backup, external sharing, and completed work.

Do engineering firms need different IT from law and accounting firms?

Design practices and professional service firms share concerns around confidentiality and record keeping, but the constraints that shape their technology differ. Law and accounting IT is driven largely by regulation and data sensitivity. Engineering and architecture IT is driven by file size and software performance, which makes it primarily a hardware, storage, and network question.

What should an engineering practice ask an IT provider?

Useful questions include whether the provider has specified workstations for CAD or BIM work and against whose requirements, how they would diagnose a slow-opening model, what they would propose for long-term project archives as distinct from backup, and whether they can support the design software itself and not only the operating system. Providers whose experience is confined to standard office environments tend to give generic answers to these questions.