How to Avoid Orphaning Project Information

Seeing the need

Our goal from the outset has been to provide the ability to manage project information no matter where it exists. That goal has become more important than ever because the relentless march of technology innovation is creating more and more places for critical project information to live, hide, and become orphaned.

Enterprise cloud storage services are the latest incarnation in a long history of solutions adopted by our industry. Others include document management systems, the establishment of dedicated project domain networks, project hosting, Riverbed® appliances, and more.

Enterprise cloud storage services are a new approach to an old problem. Two drivers are motivating their adoption:

The amount of project information being generated, stored and archived on our clients’ networks is growing relentlessly, and cloud storage services scale very readily.
Enterprise cloud storage services address the internet latency and bandwidth limitations that would otherwise throttle the effectiveness of regionally and globally dispersed project teams.

Avoiding information silos

The benefit of Newforma’s integration with cloud storage services is its simplicity and transparency:

Newforma projects require no changes when accessing data in cloud-enabled storage.
End users transparently experience all the performance benefits of the global file storage solution.
Newforma enterprise software indexes and searches across all project files in all office locations, whether that information is on a LAN or in the cloud.
The integration of all Newforma functionality is seamless and transparent to end users, whether connecting to a project on a local file store or any of the supported cloud storage solution providers.

Tip of the iceberg

As storage and bandwidth requirements continue to grow, we’re betting on a widespread migration to either shared or private cloud storage. The conventional approach to growing storage and bandwidth requirements – adding on-premise servers, SAN systems, replication technology and more – is simply too expensive to scale and increasingly difficult to manage.

(And parenthetically, the overworked IT professionals who maintain the required office infrastructures often double as the local, on-premise Newforma experts, so we’ve also seen the considerable strain and quality-of-life impact that these developments have put on these team members!)

Cloud storage services appear to be the most cost-effective solution for design and construction companies because they offer LAN-like access to large datasets. Newforma customers can adopt them with confidence that Newforma Project Center works seamlessly with these and other industry-leading cloud storage integration providers.

But what about personal cloud storage services such as Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive? I’ll talk about them next time.

Next week: Using Personal Cloud Solutions To Streamline Project Information Delivery