Securely Execute Short-Term AEC Projects with HP Anyware and Microsoft Azure

In an increasingly hybrid world, architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) companies are finding creative ways to address their specific needs, especially when it comes to staying secure during short-term projects. With digital workspaces solution HP Anyware and cloud services platform Microsoft Azure, AEC businesses can continue to embrace hybrid work for short- and long-term projects, for full-time employees as well as temporary workers.

HP Anyware is the high-performance digital workspaces solution that helps AEC businesses stay productive and flexible in hybrid environments. As part of a digital transformation for operations, risk management, external access, job (planning and control), people engagement (internal and external) and innovation, Microsoft Azure and HP Anyware enable architecture, engineering and construction industry customers can reap the benefits of a flexible solution that helps ensure intellectual property (IP) stays secure even when temporary workers are accessing short-term projects from outside the office, whether that is from home, on the job, on location, or in the field.

In this post, we’ll outline the unique requirements of hybrid AEC teams and how Azure virtual desktops deployed with HP Anyware address those challenges.

Understanding AEC short-term project requirements

AEC firms work on a variety of project types, some of which can take years to develop, and others that are short-term. The latter can be challenging, especially when it comes to managing temporary workers.

There are four primary challenges facing AEC teams in hybrid environments:

1. Keeping the workforce flexible and mobile

Both full-time and temporary workers are asking for mobility—they don’t want to be tied to a single desk in a single location. And in hybrid working models, it’s far more beneficial to reach the best talent, no matter where they are located. But flexibility can’t come at the expense of productivity for geographically dispersed AEC professionals.

2. Protecting valuable IP while maintaining accessibility

AEC businesses work with high-profile clients on projects such as schools, residential buildings, hotels, even government and military installations. The IP these companies handle is extremely confidential and cannot be compromised. But in a hybrid world, especially with revolving groups of temporary workers, many of whom work with multiple clients simultaneously, keeping data secure yet accessible from everywhere is a top priority for IT teams.

3. Adopting hybrid technology without impacting performance

Staff adoption of technology can be a huge challenge—time needs to be set aside to train employees and temporary workers, who often won't need full-fledged infrastructure. Deployment needs to be simple, or IT will spend all their time troubleshooting, which isn’t feasible considering the duration of short-term projects. The technology the company chooses not only needs to be accessible from wherever workers are located, but secure and able to produce the high-performance required by AEC teams.

4. Creating a collaborative environment even when workers are apart

Collaboration has been one of the biggest challenges for businesses in a hybrid world. Not being in the same physical space as one’s colleagues has made collaborating in real-time difficult. For AEC teams who are largely working on 2D/3D CAD applications and GPU-accelerated photo-realistic models, collaboration tools need to enable connection across geographies as well as high-performance.

How HP Anyware and Microsoft Azure benefit hybrid AEC teams

Based on pioneering PCoIP® technology, HP Anyware helps IT teams keep AEC employees and short-term workers productive and flexible while reducing IT overhead expenditures related to costly physical workstation purchases. HP Anyware also ensures that valuable IP remains safe in the data center by transmitting interactive encrypted pixels to the endpoint. Microsoft Azure is a trusted cloud platform that empowers businesses to operate seamlessly in a hybrid environment. AEC firms will find several advantages in deploying high-performance remote desktops with Microsoft Azure and HP Anyware, particularly for short-term projects where temporary workers need to access workloads remotely.

Flexibility

Whether your data center is located on-premises, or on a private or public cloud like Microsoft Azure, HP Anyware gives AEC companies secured access to their data centers, without the need for a Virtual Private Network (VPN). This greatly decreases time needed to transfer large CAD files and enhances the user experience for workers that need high-fidelity graphics, exact color representation, and delicate control of CAD modeling applications that can be adversely affected by the use of a VPN.

Additionally, in today’s hybrid work environment AEC teams must be able to quickly and professionally cater to their customers’ communication needs. Oftentimes, this entails getting direct feedback from customers by meeting in-person, travelling, and working in potentially hazardous environments, scenarios that can put expensive hardware and locally stored data at risk. The HP Anyware solution enables AEC teams to work with their customers and prospects in the way that best suits their customers’ needs while getting the same consistent user experience as working at their local workstation whether they’re accessing the digital workspace from the office, home, or in the field.

Plus, HP Anyware’s lightweight agents and clients can be easily installed on virtually any infrastructure and types of endpoints.

Within minutes you can deploy HP Anyware virtual desktops on Azure, quickly bringing on new workers with secure access to applications and data in Azure for short- and long-term projects, and avoid having to ship and remotely manage physical workstations. Accessing virtual machines on the Azure cloud via HP Anyware maintains security and is a cost-effective way to run short-term AEC projects. Even without heavy-duty endpoints, AEC temporary workers can login to HP Anyware to access their remote desktops and still achieve the level of performance they would be accustomed to in an office environment.

Watch a 3D visualization demo using Revit on HP Anyware at Autodesk 2022:

Performance

The PCoIP protocol that HP Anyware is based on offers AEC professionals high performance, with distortion-free lossless support and color and text accuracy even when AEC teams are visualizing photo-realistic CAD designs or building immersive product demonstrations. PCoIP dynamically adapts to network conditions to deliver a great experience even with variable bandwidth so that AEC teams enjoy smooth and consistent interactions with their design applications.

Collaboration

AEC professionals can use HP Anyware’s collaboration tool to invite colleagues, temporary workers, and even clients to a real-time collaboration session. The collaboration feature allows users keyboard and mouse takeover for a truly collaborative experience. This enables dispersed teams to work as though they are in the same room as their colleagues for real-time problem solving, live engineering design reviews, and collaborative hands-on training. Watch HP Anyware collaboration in action:

IT management

The Anyware Manager brokering plane ensures IT can efficiently and securely manage temporary workers’ access to internal systems and IP. On short-term projects, Anyware Manager saves IT administrators time and energy by giving them a unified interface to secure, broker, provision, and monitor remote access connections to centralized AEC data, as well as files and applications.

Additionally, in the event of critical local machine failure or accidental workstation loss, such as theft or an accident, IT teams can quickly and easily get users back up and running using virtually any device allowing teams to continue their work and meet important deadlines.

Security

PCoIP technology allows AEC professionals to get secure, centralized access to their graphics-intensive applications without compromising user experience, all without a VPN that offers only patchy security. PCoIP traffic is secured by AES 256 encryption and for additional security, the PCoIP protocol only transmits encrypted pixels. No AEC data ever leaves the data center. Wherever AEC professionals are working from, whether they’re full-time workers or temporary, IP remains secure yet accessible.

Traditional AEC data management strategies often involve transferring sensitive data/IP to local machines for additional edits, revisions, and contributions. This practice opens the door to costly data leaks. Using the combined solution of HP Anyware and Azure, sensitive files remain centralized and secure while only sharing encrypted pixel information with the end user. AEC teams can rest assured that their new hires, contractors, and temporary team members can work safely without the potential risk of valuable IP falling into the wrong hands.

With an Azure cloud subscription and HP Anyware, AEC customers can easily deploy high-performance remote desktops with Microsoft Windows®. Then it’s simply a matter of logging in to HP Anyware and AEC professionals can start designing, planning and managing AEC projects and collaborating with geographically dispersed team members on project visualizations.

Elevate hybrid AEC workflows with HP Anyware and Microsoft Azure

Numerous AEC businesses are already investing in the HP Anyware digital workspaces software. By migrating their remote and hybrid workflows to Azure Cloud, AEC firms can ensure their full-time and temporary teams remain agile, productive, and deliver projects from wherever they are.

Learn more about HP Anyware for Azure virtual machines at Microsoft Azure Marketplace. For information on purchasing HP Anyware for Microsoft Azure, contact us at HP Anyware Azure Demo.