Why Does Your Construction Firm Need The Cloud?
Should you be using the cloud for your construction firm?
Almost certainly – the cloud is so saturated in the modern business world that, at this point, it’s obvious that you need to be making use of it.
If you’re not already using the cloud for file sharing and storage, you’re way behind the times. But if you’re also failing to take advantage of the construction industry-specific features the cloud can deliver, then you’re missing out.
Curious as to what those benefits are?
10 Benefits The Cloud Offers Construction Firms
- Enjoy Cost-Effective IT
The cloud services subscription model offers the strategic advantage of low-cost, low-risk opt-in combined with a simple, predictable monthly fee. Your IT company should be able to deliver this – are they?
- Harness More Powerful IT Resources
The cloud has the ability to activate tens of thousands of CPUs. This unparalleled power can quickly perform deep analytics of your data, and process nearly any ad-hoc queries that you require.
- Keep Your Crew Connected
With cloud technology, your staff doesn’t have to wait for each other to be done with their part of the document or project in order to tackle their own aspect. They can all work on the same project at the same time to maximize productivity.
- Grow IT With Your Firm
Cloud services have the unique strategic characteristic of being able to stretch or shrink to suit your current level of demand. This is especially useful for businesses of any scale that will change in size over time.
- Connect Your Sites
When you want to see progress on a given work site, how do you go about it?Do you read reports filed by crew members? Or maybe you visit the site directly, driving however far it may be?
This is a time-consuming, ineffective way to go about managing your sites – and the cloud can help.
The cloud allows you to connect and view job sites remotely from a single cloud platform. Depending on the scope of your firm and how far apart job sites are, this could save you hours every day in travel time, allowing you instead to check in on sites from the comfort of your office (or wherever else you have an Internet connection).
- Get Rid Of Old Technology
Are you still using the same old line of business software that you’ve been using for years and years? As dependable as it may be (and let’s be honest, mileage varies) software like this has a core flaw – it only works for those who are fluent in it. After all, it’s not that accessible if you’re not familiar with it.While some members of your team, depending on their experience and skill set, may be an expert with your legacy software, what about the wider community of subcontractors you have to work with?
The cloud can help with this as well – new centralized project management platforms bring everyone together in one intuitive cloud location. Now, instead of needing to be trained on unintuitive, outdated software, your entire team can make use of a modern, user-friendly cloud platform.
- Enjoy Simple And Secure Access To Your Data
This is a core benefit of all cloud deployments – store your data in the cloud so you can keep it safe, and access it from where and where you need to.By moving your vital data to the cloud, you can enhance your security, increase data accessibility for staff members and lower costs. Instead of storing onsite, you can reduce costly local hardware by storing your files in the cloud, where they’ll be safe and easily accessible by you and your staff.
- Automate Your Processes
Automation with machine learning plays an enormous role in optimizing workflows and predicting problems before they occur. With workflows based in the cloud, you can automate or semi-automate many processes:
- Use analytics to predict problems before they arise.
- Automate and monitor work and maintenance schedules.
- Track and optimize work-in-progress on sites using sensors that monitor downtime.
- Accessed BIM Where And When You Want To
You can also access and monitor projects with Building Information Modeling (BIM) to manage and create 3D building data during the course of a project. BIM software is now geared towards all construction professionals, not just architects.It provides a digital representation of a building for construction documentation production, planning, performance predictions and cost estimates. You can use it to demonstrate the entire building life cycle, processes of construction and facility operations.
- Put Your Data To Work
During the lifecycle of any project, you must process and share massive amounts of information like architectural and engineering drawings, production schedules, time and materials inventories, and more. The cloud provides the ability to store and process the big data that’s needed for this.
No matter which IT company you choose to work with, they should be able to deliver these benefits along with the cloud. If they can’t? Then you should consider working with The Data Center.
We’re proud to deliver robust and secure cloud capabilities to our clients in the construction industry, helping them to harness the power of new technology and transform the way they work every day.
Like this article? Check out the following blogs to learn more:
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