How Cloud Computing can save time and money in the Construction Industry

With the ending of the mining boom, Building and Construction is one of the few industries in Australia that continue to do well, however with declining productivity and the recent slowdown in new housing projects the pressure is on for construction companies to better utilise their existing workforce and “do more with less” when it comes to ICT spending. Cloud Computing with it inherent advantage to enable better team collaboration, mobility and multi device access, low cost of acquisition, predictable operating cost and reliability is one of those technologies that is uniquely suited to revolutionise the construction industry.

In the 2013 AIG National CEO Survey – Technology Investment and Productivity in Australian businesses, a case study for John Holland stated that connectivity between executives to employees, enabling collaboration, and being better connected to customers and community as fundamental to the organisation. The business was increasing use of mobile devices in many parts of the organisation including engineers to access drawings and safety documents.

Cloud based Software as a Service offerings such as Microsoft Office365’s Exchange and Skype for Business Online are all designed to enable employees to collaborate and communicate with other employees and external 3rd parties while SharePoint Online and OneDrive are designed to facilitate anywhere and anytime access to corporate files and documents.

In a 2012 report titled the Modelling the Economic Impact of Cloud Computing KPMG predicts that if the take up of Cloud Computing by the construction sector reaches 50%, the cost reduction of ICT spending as a percentage of total company cost will fall from a base of 1.2% to 1.1% and 9.8% to 8.1% for Opex and Capex respectively. That is a reduction of 8.3% for Opex and 17% for Capex. Further, if a uniform take up of 75% across the industry was achieve the reduction in Opex and Capex would be a massive 16.7% and 25.3%.

To realise these potentials Construction companies must start to shift from massive upfront heavy investment in on-premises ICT infrastructure to a steady predictable operational cost focussed Cloud Computing such Infrastructure as Service, Platform as a Service, Disaster Recovery as a Service technologies from the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and PicNet’s ResilentGate.

For more information on how you can join the Cloud Computing bandwagon to increase productivity, contact PicNet now.