Of all the technology innovations to hit the market in the last few decades, one of the most transformational technologies in recent memory has been the advent of the cloud. Cloud technology has completely changed the landscape of many different industries including, more recently, the construction industry.

Nearly everyone in the business world is very familiar with the term ‘the cloud’ by now, but for those of you who haven’t had the chance to dive in to this ground-breaking technology yet, here’s a quick (non-technical) recap:

Life Before the Cloud

Prior to the cloud, businesses were forced to invest in an IT infrastructure in order for local servers or computers to host their core business applications and data. This meant deploying dedicated hardware to host and run your mission-critical applications. This also meant hiring an IT team to manage, troubleshoot, and upgrade that infrastructure over time while business processes continued to evolve.

This essentially meant that your data was stored locally and, in order to access that data, you would need to pass through some specific channels. For example, if your data was stored on the hard drive of a computer, you may only be able to access the data from that specific computer. Or if someone outside of your local network needed access to the data, you would need to store that data on a server local to your network and provide the employee, who is external to your network, with secure access into the network in order to retrieve the data from the shared location.

Not only was this setup complex to manage but it was also prohibitive for an employee trying to do their job. The employee would need to understand the IT process involved just for them to simply have access to the information they need to perform their work.

What made this worse was scale. The bigger the company, the more local architectures the IT team would need to manage and the more training employees required.

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