IT Support for Engineering Firms, Sized for the Analysis Run

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An engineering consultancy’s IT is judged at eleven o’clock on the night before a submission, when a structural analysis run has to finish, the Civil 3D corridor has to rebuild, and the federated model has to open for the person checking clashes. Nothing about that resembles an office of spreadsheets, and most IT solutions sold to the engineering industry are sized for the office of spreadsheets.

We’re NexSys. We’ve supported engineering firms since 2013, alongside the architects and builders they work with, and everything we run is built around that work. Noel Tippett, a senior systems engineer, came from Aurecon and HASSELL. Malcolm Brightman spent years at Norman Disney & Young and Tetra Tech building SD-WAN across the UK, Canada and Asia Pacific. Michael Grocott, also ex-NDY, has run virtualised Autodesk platforms and render infrastructure for two decades.

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IT support for engineering firms starts with compute and engineering workflows, not procurement

Engineering workloads pull two ways at once. Revit and Civil 3D do most of their everyday work on a single core, and Autodesk’s Revit 2026 requirements say to buy the highest single-core base clock rather than the most cores. Analysis and simulation packages want the opposite, many cores and a lot of memory, and a finite element run or a drainage simulation will happily take every one of them. A fleet bought to one spec serves half the engineering teams badly, and the performance issues show up on project timelines. Always.

So we spec by role. Documentation and modelling seats get clock speed and a sensible GPU. Analysis seats get cores and memory, and where a firm runs a handful of heavy jobs a month we’d rather give them scheduled access to a shared compute node than put a workstation the price of a small car under every desk. Autodesk lists 64 GB or more of memory for large Revit models and 100 GB of free disk for temporary files alone, and point clouds from a site scan push both higher. We size from your largest live model and largest files, not from a catalogue, which is the cost effective way round.

Project data and client data segmented by discipline, with secure access and team collaboration that behaves

A multi-discipline consultancy has structural, civil, mechanical and electrical teams in one federated model, each with its own linked file and its own idea of who should be able to see what. We segment project data by discipline and by project, with access controls governed rather than inherited, so the mechanical team can’t quietly overwrite the structural model and unauthorised access to project information is a log entry, not a discovery. A departing contractor’s access ends with the contract.

Then there’s worksharing. Autodesk’s guidance is that a Revit local copy and its central file belong in the same geographic location, because they exchange data constantly and that traffic was never designed for a VPN. Autodesk’s knowledge base is equally direct about sync-based cloud storage: if you expect an experience similar to worksharing on a local network, the answer is no. For firms with a site office or a second city we stream project storage rather than syncing it, and for the rest we run a properly specified server with low-latency storage, because AutoCAD external references on SharePoint aren’t found unless the files are downloaded locally, a lesson most civil teams learn once.

Engineering software licences that match who actually uses them

Here’s an opinion some Autodesk resellers won’t like. Most engineering firms give everyone the AEC Collection when a third of the office only opens Civil 3D and another third opens Revit twice a month. Standalone Civil 3D costs less than the Collection, and Flex lets an occasional user run Civil 3D by the day, with tokens valid for a year. A graduate who runs a design check once a fortnight is a Flex user, not a Collection seat. It isn’t close.

As an Autodesk Elite Partner we can see your subscription position, and an audit usually finds seats nobody has signed into for a quarter. Autodesk sells named-user subscriptions only, one person per seat, so an unassigned seat is just money. We reassign, retire and tell you the number, and we do the same for Bluebeam and Adobe.

Cyber security, data security, retention and the infrastructure client's compliance requirements

Engineering carries obligations an architecture studio mostly doesn’t. Certified designs are critical data that has to be recoverable years after practical completion, and infrastructure clients ask for it in writing, with the industry regulations that go with it. Infrastructure NSW’s 2025 Digitalisation and Data Policy requires information requirements and the common data environment on state infrastructure projects to follow ISO 19650, with an 18-month transition, and Queensland has required BIM on government construction projects worth $50 million or more since July 2019. That flows down to every consultant as a CDE with defined states, archived deliverables and an audit trail.

Cyber threats arrive with the same tenders, and so do the industry standards for handling them. State frameworks in Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland all point at the ACSC’s Essential Eight. Tier 1 contractors ask consultants to state their maturity level and who assessed it. Cameron Zad, our Director of Technical Services, would rather you spend the first dollar on identity than on another appliance, because a stolen password walks into the project drive and no firewall ever stopped one. So multi-factor authentication on every account, conditional access that challenges an unfamiliar sign-in, and Autodesk’s named-user licensing bound to the same identity come first, because sensitive project data is the client’s intellectual property as much as yours.

A caveat. If you’re an eight-person civil firm with no ISO 19650 obligations and no government clients, our full managed model is more than you need. Buy an audit and some hours, and call us when the first Tier 1 questionnaire arrives.

Managed services for engineering operations, with fast support from a desk that knows what a corridor rebuild is

The list is familiar to any engineering business buying information technology support services: proactive monitoring of your IT infrastructure and IT systems around the clock, a 24/7 service desk, patching scheduled around submission dates, endpoint protection, backup and disaster recovery, and licence management. The difference is triage. A failed sync before a project deadline outranks a printer, we resolve issues in the order the submission needs, and the person on the desk has seen a Navisworks clash report before. Backups are tested by restoring a live model, not by reading a log, and stored where a compromised account can’t delete them, with recovery time written into the agreement as a number.

If you already have an internal IT team, co-managed IT means they keep the day-to-day and we take the infrastructure, the security tooling and the after-hours pages. Malcolm Brightman also leads the development of ALTO, our cloud based solution built for AEC workloads, for firms that would rather not run a server room in their day to day operations, and the technology decisions about which fits are made from your IT environment, not a brochure.

Questions engineers ask first

Does every engineer need an AEC Collection subscription?

Usually not. Standalone Civil 3D, or Flex tokens for an occasional user, is often enough. We match the licence to actual use and show you the saving.

How much memory does a workstation need for large models?

Autodesk’s Revit 2026 requirements list 16 GB for entry-level work and 64 GB or more for large, complex models, plus 100 GB of free disk for temporary files. Analysis packages and point clouds push that higher.