Geomatics

Problem

One of Avatara's geomatics engineering customers is a family-owned firm founded in 1962 on the principles of high quality and excellent client service. The firm has a large geographic footprint, serving 20% of the counties in the U.S., with numerous regional offices throughout the Midwest and East Coast providing landscape architecture, UAS services, site design and development, and LiDAR services.

The firm had many of the common pain points that our engineering clients had before they decided to make the jump to CompleteCloud.

  • 5 locations in different states
  • Over 100 employees
  • 50% are high-end CAD graphics users
  • 30 TB of data, which resulted in thousand in backup costs annually
  • Complex & expensive server infrastructure needing to be refreshed

Solution

The engineering firm made their transition to CompleteCloud in December of 2019. Shortly after, in March of 2020, state and nationwide work from home restrictions were put in place to help fight the spread of COVID-19. For businesses that rely heavily on CAD, working from home can be extremely challenging due to the nature that most CAD stations are tethered to the office. As a result, being forced to work from home crippled hundreds of engineering and architecture firms without the ability to access these applications from home. That wasn't the case for Avatara customers.

In less than a week, this engineering firm was able to transition every employee at every location to working from home. That included 50% of their employees that are graphics users and needed access at home and in the field. They were able to flawlessly make the shift to working from home because of the CompleteCloud Platform.

  • CompleteCloud Infrastructure:With all their servers and desktops moved offsite into secure SSAE type 2 Data Centers, every employee was able to securely access their virtual machines and data from home on their personal computers or work laptops.
  • Support:Our support team was still there, 24x7, whenever they had questions or needed help in their new home offices (or kitchen tables, living room couches, or patios).
  • Productivity:Chat, video, and file sharing applications helped employees to effectively communicate with one another despite being incredibly spread out.
  • Security:Just because you're working from home doesn't mean you shouldn't remain compliant and secure. The firm was able to take their security envelope home and maintain security despite not being in their 4 walls.

Results

Without CompleteCloud, the engineering firm would have been in a dire situation. It was so impactful that the company's president said, “If this had happened in December before we had you guys, we would have been dead in the water.”

The market is shifting to make workforces more mobile and not being chained to the office. Not only does this improve employee productivity, but it also improves employee satisfaction. Unfortunately, most businesses today are incapable of making this shift and COVID-19 revealed the Achilles Heel of many businesses' IT solutions.