5 Steps to Project Delivery on the Cloud

Marcus Roberts, Technology Director of Atvero, talks about how Atvero can ensure your project record data is protected, secure and accessible on the Cloud.

Moving to the cloud in a world of remote working

In times of increased remote working in the construction industry, companies are assessing the merits of moving systems, in full or in part, to the Cloud in support of a Digital Office. In developing such strategies and solution selection, there are of course many considerations to this goal including reliability of service, data security, migration, process redefinition, training of staff and finally cost. At Atvero, we treat these considerations as critical business and success factors to ensuring your project record data is protected, is secure and accessible when needed. This post outlines our approach.

Reliability and data security

reliability and data security. Let’s be realistic - whether your data is held on-premise, on your own servers in data centres, or even on Google and Microsoft 365 Cloud platforms no system is full proof and system outages do occur. What is important is how frequently those problems occur, how quickly they are recovered from, and how much effort is needed by you to recover from them. By making a choice to go with one of the big Cloud providers, you can be sure if there is an infrastructure issue, there will be a global team of engineers working to resolve it within minutes of it starting, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The large Cloud providers have dedicated teams of site reliability engineers (SREs) working around the clock to detect potential issues and fix them before they impact you and your business.

Over 80% of businesses in the construction industry use Microsoft 365, and Atvero is fully integrated into it. Microsoft 365 has many data protection and information governance systems built into it allowing businesses to have full confidence over the confidentiality and integrity of their data. PII can be flagged and tagged. Information can be but into retention holds to avoid accidental or malicious deletion. And identity is based on Azure Active Directory, integrating seamlessly into your existing on-premise security systems. Cyber security is also industry leading - multifactor authentication to guard against password theft from phishing and malware, automated risk analysis to warn you if users login in from unlikely locations and much more.

The data held in Microsoft 365 within Atvero is protected with Microsoft's top class redundancy - multiple copies of the data at one location, and then copies of the same data in different data centres in completely different geographical locations. Using an Atvero backup and archive add-on, the data can be copied into a different location completely, or even a different Cloud provider, providing you with read-only access even if Microsoft's systems are down.

Data migration

When considering moving from on-premise or incumbent document management systems to the Cloud, an obvious question is what happens to all my project data. With Atvero we have developed sophisticated migration tools that efficiently takes your issued project records and project email into Atvero, maintaining all available project metadata and transactional data on the way. We can license software to companies or provide the service to migrate from Newforma, Deltek PIM and Mail Manager. All of which makes the transition smooth and cost effective, while maintaining the data integrity of your legacy or current projects.

Redifining processes

Whether a shift to the Cloud is seen as part of a business transformation, a chance to refine business processes or to rationalise systems used, there will be invariable a change to project delivery processes. With Atvero, our goal is to provide simplicity of use that brings consistency and standardisation without overloading the user with process. Preferring the flexibility metadata and tagging over folders and tree structures, Atvero lets users build a view of the information that matches their mental model, rather than imposing a rigid structure. Atvero makes the right way the easy way, guiding users through simple steps during project record creation so that records are named consistently and documents are created from the most recent templates, reducing the potential for errors and so improving quality.

Retraining staff

In the past, bringing your business with you on any new systems took time to educate your staff – mainly because that each vendor has its own flavour on what makes a good UI. Because Atvero is integrated into Microsoft 365, the interface and way of working is one your staff will already be used to if they've used Outlook, Word or Excel.

Also from configuration to full deployment the cycle for gaining value was traditionally a long drawn out process. Because there's no infrastructure to stand up, and because users are already familiar with the interface, you can get started with small pilot groups fast. By building on that Microsoft 365 foundation, with Atvero you can expect professional and structured training that can be delivered within half a day, supported by comprehensive step-by-step help guides and feature based articles. Sounds simple. It is.

And finally, what about the cost?

At Atvero, we commit not to be beaten on price when compared with your incumbent or a competitive system. Our goal is increased value to your project delivery with low adminstration, however you wish to measure. And so you can trust in Atvero to be disruptive, with responsive support team, while also adding value to your Microsoft 365 subscription.