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The Critical Role of IT and Cybersecurity play in Architectural Firms

June 2, 2024 | David McFadden

The Critical Role of IT and Cybersecurity in Architectural Firms: Why Secure Digital Infrastructure is a Must in 2025

Innovation, precision, and efficiency have always driven the architecture industry. However, as firms increasingly embrace cloud collaboration, BIM technology, and digital workflows, many unknowingly expose themselves to serious cybersecurity and IT risks.

Consulting For Architects Inc. has been helping architecture firms find the right talent for over 35 years. But today’s professionals need more than just skills—they need a secure and reliable IT foundation to do their best work.

That’s why leading firms prioritize cybersecurity and IT infrastructure to protect client data, ensure seamless project collaboration, and prevent costly downtime. To provide expert insight into this critical issue, we turned to DCS, a leading Managed IT and cybersecurity provider in New York specializing in helping professional firms secure their companies.

The Growing Digital Risk in Architecture

Architecture firms handle vast amounts of sensitive data, from proprietary designs to confidential client contracts. While cloud-based design tools and remote collaboration have revolutionized the industry, they have also introduced new vulnerabilities that, if ignored, could jeopardize entire projects.

Common IT and cybersecurity risks in architecture firms include:

Ransomware attacks that lock firms out of their project files
Data breaches exposing client projects and intellectual property
Network failures causing slowdowns in collaboration tools
Compliance risks for firms handling government or corporate contracts
Poor disaster recovery planning, putting entire projects at risk in the event of a system failure

“Many architecture firms assume that only large corporations are targeted by cyberattacks,” says [DCS Expert Name]. “In reality, attackers look for weak entry points, and firms using unsecured cloud storage, outdated hardware, or weak authentication are prime targets.”

Why IT Failures Can Cost Architectural Firms Millions

When IT systems fail, architects, designers, and project managers can’t work—leading to missed deadlines, lost revenue, and even legal consequences.

The high cost of IT and cybersecurity failures in architecture:

Downtime delays: If a BIM model becomes corrupted or inaccessible, entire teams sit idle, costing firms thousands per hour.
Lost projects: A ransomware attack or data breach can lead to contract violations, financial penalties, and lost clients.
Compliance violations: Firms handling government contracts or commercial developments must meet strict security regulations—a breach could mean major legal issues.

To avoid these risks, architecture firms need a secure, well-managed IT infrastructure explicitly designed for their workflows.

How DCS Helps Architectural Firms Stay Secure and Operational

DCS specializes in providing IT solutions tailored to the architecture and design industry, ensuring that firms can work efficiently without IT disruptions.

Key IT and cybersecurity solutions for architecture firms include:

Cloud security for BIM and CAD files – Ensuring safe access to project data from anywhere without security risks
Disaster recovery and business continuity – Protecting firms with automated data backups and rapid recovery solutions
Cybersecurity protection – Implementing firewall security, threat detection, and compliance frameworks
Network optimization for large design files – Speeding up file transfers and collaboration across multiple locations
24/7 IT monitoring and support – Preventing system failures before they impact project deadlines

“The key to protecting an architecture firm’s IT infrastructure is proactive security, not reactive fixes,” says Richard Delaney. “If your firm is only thinking about IT after something goes wrong, you’re already too late.”

IT Security is Now a Competitive Advantage for Architecture Firms

Clients are increasingly aware of cybersecurity risks and expect their architecture partners to demonstrate secure data management. Firms that invest in cybersecurity and IT compliance will have a competitive edge when bidding for major projects.

By working with a trusted IT partner like DCS, architecture firms can:

Strengthen client trust by ensuring secure project collaboration
Reduce operational risk with proactive security and disaster recovery
Avoid costly downtime that can derail project timelines and profitability

Building a Secure Future for Architecture

At Consulting For Architects Inc., we know that architecture success requires top-tier talent and cutting-edge technology. Ensuring your firm’s IT infrastructure is secure and optimized is as critical as hiring the right professionals.

To learn more about how DCS helps architecture and other professional firms build a secure IT foundation, visit Delaney Computer Services – Managed IT & Cybersecurity Services.

BIM, CAD, Design Technology | Comments Off

Computers are great tools for architects, but don’t let CAD go wild

February 11, 2011 | David McFadden

: Designing using CAD

As an AEC staffing expert and someone who has sold, supported and trained in CAD products for years, I would love to know your thoughts on this article. For example, why is BIM below the radar?

Architects can now design buildings without lifting a pencil, thanks to computer technology. In fact, digitally conceived architecture can be too complex to draw by hand or to develop using conventional drawings, even those printed by machine. Yet there may be risks in abandoning the pencil and relying so completely on the computer.

Drawing manually used to be an indispensable architectural skill, and not just for mechanical drafting. Drawing by hand was how historic architecture was documented and analyzed, and how incipient design ideas were recorded and explored graphically. For many architects, drawing by hand is both inherently pleasurable and integral to critical design thinking, a way to directly and creatively connect the eye, brain and hand. But today, computers enable architects to do little or no manual drawing, and drawing less by hand may tempt some architects to think less critically.

In architecture offices today, you rarely find a drafting board with a parallel bar, rolls of tracing paper, measuring scales, triangles, drawing templates or boxes of pencils and markers. Instead you see a workstation with a flat-screen monitor, keyboard and mouse. Many designers use computers for “drawing” everything: diagrams, preliminary design studies, three-dimensional views and construction documents. Produced on large-format printers, drawings can even be made to look like hand-drawn sketches.

Computer-aided-design (CAD) has transformed architectural design methodology, not because it eliminates manual drawing, but because it allows architects to compose stacks of drawings at every stage of design. Architects can show clients countless design variations, create realistic renderings and graphic simulations, and produce detailed construction documents.

Once preliminary design studies – site plan and massing studies, floor plan layouts, sections and elevations – are undertaken and a preliminary digital model is created, the architect can obtain three-dimensional views, including animated walk-throughs or fly-throughs. The designer also can modify any part of the project, whether a house or a high-rise, and CAD software can automatically edit and update all parts of the design affected by the modification.

CAD software can manage a vast amount of layered data, keeping track of and coordinating all digital model components and systems, such as the structural skeleton, windows, doors, interior partitions, floor finishes, ductwork and plumbing. These programs can alert the designer if components conflict geometrically and can instantly recompute dimensions, floor areas and material quantities.

It gets even better. When a design is finalized and fully defined in a three-dimensional digital model, CAD programs can print annotated, two-dimensional drawings for bidding, building permits and construction. For highly complex designs that cannot be adequately represented and interpreted using conventional documents, the digital model itself can become the primary documentation.

Architect Frank Gehry’s work epitomizes and necessitates this approach. His design concepts begin as sketchbook squiggles or crumpled paper and are ultimately transformed into volumetrically complicated, expressively curvaceous buildings impossible to draw. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Stata Center at M.I.T. and the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park could not have been designed and constructed without using digital models.

Contractors for these projects directly accessed Gehry’s digital models, not conventional drawings. That was the only way they could calculate and price the enormous quantities of materials and labor necessary to fabricate and install the thousands of steel structural members and metal panels that make up the complex exterior skins of these buildings. Only with advanced computer technology could Gehry’s idiosyncratic approach to design have evolved and his projects been implemented.

Yet if every architect emulated Gehry’s expressive approach, a lot of bad architecture would result. This is because CAD can seductively induce “I can, therefore I shall” thinking. Because architects can digitally model almost any form they can dream up, CAD can lead to excessively complex, overwrought building designs – form for form’s sake. Such CAD-gone-wild buildings may be inappropriate for their sites, functionally inefficient, difficult to construct, way over budget and perhaps even ugly.

During the preliminary design phase, CAD programs also can yield machine-printed drawings that make a schematic design idea appear more precise, refined and resolved than it really is. Before CAD, concepts drawn by hand often were sketchy and loosely delineated with wavy or fuzzy lines laid down by soft pencils, felt-tip pens or charcoal. The art and technique of manual drawing ensured that schematic ideas looked schematic.

The computer is a powerful tool, but still just a tool that must be used properly. Designers who never draw manually still must engage in critical thinking and rational invention, as if they were drawing and designing by hand, even though their hand grasps a mouse instead of a pencil.

Via Washington Post

architects, architecture, CAD, Design | Bilbao, CAD, Chicago's Millennium Park, Guggenheim Museum, Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Los Angeles, Spain, Stata Center at M.I.T., Walt Disney Concert Hall | Comments Off

Winter Street Architects, Salem, MA – Biting the BIM Bullet

August 20, 2009 | David McFadden

I have said numerous times lately that the lessons of this prolonged recession and necessity to achieve efficiency’s to survive will be a game changer for BIM acceptance in AEC firms. Everyday I see evidence supporting that. Here is a post from a firm in Salem, MA that agrees that BIM is key in moving forward and competing:

Photo-realistic BIM Rendering of the Salem State College, Weir-Stanley Building Music Rehearsal Space

If you haven’t done it by now, you better get to it! Or fall so far behind you may never be able to catch up. Bite the BIM bullet. It’s the future of the building industry and the future is now or just around the corner. Our firm swallowed the BIM pill way back in 2003; a year after Revit was first introduced to the market by Autodesk. What we saw then was what other industries have been doing for years: virtually prototyping and testing designs prior to fabrication. Economics and compute power had the practice relegated to big business and complex industries, but now the industrial evolution has finally availed these tools to the AEC Industry that allow us to rise up and shed our Neanderthal trappings. Those who will not adapt and wait, or dismiss it as a passing fad, will surrender to Natural Selection ending up in their own version of the La Brea Tar Pits. What BIM allows us to do is create buildings in the same way that we think about them; as visualized complete projects. We don’t think in plans, elevations, sections and details. These methods deconstruct the total visualized idea into two dimensional components simply to communicate complexities of the idea to someone else or to allow us to coordinate others’ work into our complex idea.

Full article via Winter Street ArchitectsBlog