Engineering firms run on files that are large, valuable, and hard to replace. A 3 GB BIM model that takes five minutes to open over the VPN is not a hassle, it is a margin problem. A PDM vault that fails without a tested restore is the worst conversation you can have with a project lead on a Friday. A drawing set that ends up on a personal laptop is an ITAR or client-confidentiality issue waiting to surface. Ghosxt runs the IT, CAD performance, and engineering data security for civil, structural, MEP, and A/E firms across the Central Coast and the Bay Area. DoD-cleared engineering, transparent pricing, no outsourced helpdesk.
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Engineering IT is its own discipline. The endpoints are GPU workstations, the files are gigabytes, the version control matters more than the operating system, and a missed sync between a satellite office and the vault can mean an associate sealing the wrong revision of a drawing. Below is the work, written for principals and project managers, not for procurement decks.
24/7 monitoring, helpdesk, patching, and a real engineer who answers the phone when the vault is unreachable an hour before a submittal. Coverage scaled to your project deadlines, not to nine-to-five tickets.
Learn moreGPU class matched to your tools, 32 GB minimum RAM, NVMe scratch for working sets, and a configuration baseline that we deploy identically across the firm. Profiled file-open times, not vendor-marketing benchmarks.
Learn moreWe do not resell the platform; we run it. Vault hub on a sized server, replicated read caches at satellite offices, scheduled archive maintenance, and check-in / check-out hygiene so the version-control story holds up under a project audit.
Learn moreRevit central files, IFC clash detection, Navisworks federation. The infrastructure that keeps a 4 GB federated model openable from three offices without an hour of caching. Bandwidth shaping, network QoS, and replicated read patterns that match the way the model is actually used.
Learn moreEncryption at rest and in transit, role-based access scoped to project, ITAR / EAR boundary controls where they apply, foreign-person access enforcement, and the audit trail that survives an export-compliance review. Designed for the day an engineer leaves, not after they have already left.
Learn moreGPU-passthrough VDI, Frame and Workspot cloud workstations, on-prem RDS for firms with the right hardware. The pattern is the same: the engineer signs in from any device, the CAD work happens on a workstation we control, no file ever lands on the engineer's personal laptop.
Learn moreEngineering firms operate under licensing rules, project contracts, and (increasingly) federal flow-down clauses with IT teeth. Five frameworks that come up most often in our work.
A licensed Professional Engineer's seal on a drawing is now usually a digital seal applied through software, backed by a private key the engineer controls. The IT side is secure key handling, recoverable but non-shareable key storage, audit logging of every sealed document, and a policy that survives a state board inquiry. We treat the seal exactly the way the NCEES guidance says to.
Civil firms working on military installations, structural firms supporting defense projects, and product-design studios touching dual-use technology all sit inside the ITAR or EAR regimes. The IT side is the foreign-person access boundary: who can open which folder, who can see which email thread, who can be present on a Teams call. We architect it so a U.S.-person policy is enforceable, not aspirational.
A growing share of A/E firms hold ISO 9001 certification, often at client request on federal or large institutional projects. The IT side is document control, training records, internal audit logs, nonconformance tracking, and the corrective-action trail. We run those systems on the platforms the firm already uses, and we keep the evidence in the shape a surveillance auditor expects.
Engineering firms hold a surprising amount of personal information: client contacts, property owner data, employee files, and sometimes occupant-level building data on residential projects. CCPA / CPRA apply at the right thresholds. We map the data flows, structure the systems to honor deletion and access requests, and keep the vendor agreements (BAAs and data-processing addenda) on file before a client sends a privacy questionnaire.
Civil engineering firms bidding on Army Corps, NAVFAC, FAA, BLM, or other federal infrastructure are increasingly seeing flow-down clauses that require NIST SP 800-171 controls and, on a phased timeline, CMMC Levels 1 or 2. The IT side is the System Security Plan, the POA&M, the SPRS score, and the boundary that keeps Controlled Unclassified Information in a defined enclave. We help you read the actual clauses, scope the work, and stand up the controls before the kickoff meeting.
A DoD-cleared engineering background means we have personally built and operated inside these controls, not just consulted on them. The same posture that passes a federal contracting review passes an ITAR audit, a state board inquiry on digital seal handling, an ISO surveillance audit, and a client privacy questionnaire, with the paper trail intact.
Four anonymized examples from real client work on the Central Coast and South Bay. Names, project specifics, and firm details are removed; the patterns are exactly what we see across small and mid-size engineering practices.
A civil firm with two satellite offices was opening Revit and AutoCAD files over a single corporate VPN routed through the main office. Every project file had to fully stream across the link before it became editable. Engineers timed it: five minutes on average, sometimes ten. We deployed a PDM read replica at each satellite, set up a local cache layer for the active working set, and switched the firm to Autodesk Desktop Connector with a tuned cache. File-open times dropped to under thirty seconds for most working files. The VPN stopped being the bottleneck because most engineering traffic stopped touching it.
An A/E firm had a four-terabyte BIM and PDM vault that had been "backed up" to a single attached disk for years. Nobody had ever restored from it. When we ran a tabletop exercise, we discovered the most recent full backup had failed silently nine months earlier and only changed-block deltas were being captured against a snapshot that no longer existed. We rebuilt the chain: seeded an off-account immutable copy through a portable appliance, added block-level deduplication and bandwidth-shaped daily incrementals, and instrumented restore-from-backup as a quarterly tested procedure. A real restore now finishes within the project's recovery time objective.
A senior engineer at a structural firm gave notice and, in the two weeks before departure, synced the entirety of a long-running project's PDM history to a personal OneDrive account through a feature that had been left open in the firm's M365 tenant. Forensics found the activity after the engineer left. We rotated credentials, audited recent vault access across the firm, removed the external-sync pathway entirely, and rebuilt the offboarding lifecycle: revocations triggered by the payroll exit event hit M365, SSO, VPN, the vault, conditional access, and personal-account sync paths in the same minute. The damage was already done in that case, but the door is now closed.
A mechanical engineering studio had been letting senior engineers work from personal laptops during a hybrid-work rollout. One of those laptops was stolen in a car break-in, with the firm's PDM client signed in, a local cache of the active project, and the engineer's M365 session active. The firm could not prove the disk had been encrypted. We rolled out company-managed devices for the engineering cohort, deployed GPU-passthrough VDI for personal-device sign-in scenarios, enforced disk encryption verification on every endpoint that touches the vault, and added conditional-access policies that block sign-ins from devices that cannot prove an encrypted state.
"Ghosxt rebuilt our engineering IT a piece at a time, and the difference is something the whole studio notices. Files open faster, the vault has not surprised us once, and the security work has matured the firm in a way our clients have started asking about. Ulises picks up the phone when it matters. That has been worth more than any tool we have bought."
Engineering client, multi-year Ghosxt partner
Engineering-heavy IT problems do not stop at engineering firms. Plenty of small MSPs in our region run into them too: a CMMC Level 2 prep that is over their head, a SolidWorks PDM cluster nobody on the team has touched before, a ransomware response that needs a senior engineer in the chair right now. We work with other MSPs as a peer, not a competitor.
If you have run a firm for any length of time, none of these are new. If you are the office manager who inherited the IT side, this is the short version.
Our home base is Salinas. We work with engineering and architecture firms across the Central Coast, Santa Cruz County, and the South Bay. On-site response is fast across the corridor, and most engineering IT issues are resolved remotely the same hour.
Engineering firms often overlap with adjacent vertical pressures. Related pages worth a read.
30 minutes with a DoD-cleared engineer. Walk away with a clear picture of where your CAD performance, vault posture, security, and federal-project readiness stand, plus a written punch list of what to fix first. No sales script, no obligation.
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