Pursuing a competitive advantage is driving continued innovation and IT investment across the construction sector, but staying ahead of the curve is easier said than done. Rob Smith, CTO, of Creative ITC, discusses the latest construction technology trends helping firms overcome innovation barriers
Investing in new technologies has become a way for construction firms to unlock revenue and greater ROI. New tools and solutions enable advances in design, sustainability, health and safety and shape new commercial and operational models across the sector.
Advanced visual effects and digital twin simulations are enhancing design processes; improving supply chain collaboration; purpose-built, enterprise-scale VDI solutions are changing how businesses operate; AI and machine learning are helping companies reduce project risks and costs; robots and drones are keeping people safer on site, and new construction techniques such as 3D printing are being explored to transform project costs.
It’s a trend set to dominate the industry over the coming years, with the global market predicted to grow at a rate of 10.7% CAGR, reaching nearly $16 billion by 2028.
Yet, AEC remains a complex team sport in which digital transformation will never be a silver bullet. Legacy systems, specialist industry apps, massive datasets and huge image-rendering requirements hamper project delivery and obstruct innovation. As well as rapidly spinning up IT for new project teams, there’s a growing need to improve user experience in the new hybrid working era, collaborate better across complex supply chains, and strengthen defences in the face of increasing cyber threats. In-house technical teams have never been so stretched.
Construction technology trends: Strengthening cyber defences
Building greater business resilience is expected to be one of the key areas for technology investment across the construction sector. Half of the UK-built environment firms have experienced a ransomware attack in the past two years as cybercriminals have woken up to the potential to halt major infrastructure projects and damage reputations. No wonder two in five UK IT teams feel overwhelmed by security alerts.
In response, construction firms are adopting new cybersecurity models. Providing continuous protection against cyber attacks, Security Operations Centre-as-a-Service (SOCaaS) solutions make it fast and easy for organisations of all sizes to deploy world-class security provisions. Combining human expertise with the latest cloud technologies, SOCaaS providers work alongside in-house IT teams, ensuring rapid threat responses 24/7 and applying that learning to strengthen cyber postures and resilience.
Accelerating upgrades: Legacy systems are a huge barrier to innovation in the industry
With major construction projects taking years to complete, companies face old software that’s difficult to scale, integrate, maintain and secure. Specialist apps may have been developed by people no longer with the company, and each may be separately licenced and hosted from multiple servers and virtual machines.
Specialist providers with in-depth knowledge and experience in the construction sector are now helping to simplify digital transformation. Using advanced Kubernetes and containerisation technologies, Creative’s Modern Application Platform (MAP) is designed to de-risk legacy system updates and stretch IT budgets. MAP is a one-stop-shop solution for updating older software while simplifying cloud transitions and shrinking modernisation timescales, releasing in-house IT teams for more strategic innovation projects.
Improving global construction collaboration
With construction being a truly global industry, it’s common for business data to be accessed and stored across multiple solutions, formats and territories. This unstructured data makes it difficult for project teams to perform effectively as they struggle to access, validate and share data. A growing industry-wide issue, IT teams frequently struggle with complex data islands, server sprawl, inefficient use of storage resources and poor data recovery times.
Providing a more consolidated and secure storage setup, purpose-built solutions like Cloud File Services enable construction firms to overcome the problem. Local file caching, which serves up active data much faster to users, speeds up data retrieval and minimises the risk of duplicate file versions, document corruption and data loss.
Tailor-made digital transformation
The drive for innovation shows no sign of waning, and firms will continue to invest in new construction technology trends to facilitate mission-critical tools, high data consumption and mobile workforces. Growing data sets and continued app development mean companies must keep optimising data centre infrastructure and devices.
But digital transformation is growing more challenging. Virtualisation is snowballing while computing and storage are coming closer to the edge. There’s a growing demand for greater workload mobility, automated operations, improved performance and availability of IT resources.
To help stretch budgets and resources and unlock ROI from their IT investments, construction firms increasingly recognise the value of managed as-a-Service models from IT providers with a successful track record in the sector. Emerging, purpose-built technologies from this new breed of specialists will be invaluable in accelerating innovation, futureproofing digital transformations and helping firms stay ahead of the curve.
