Joseph Larson was a civil engineer and project manager working for Eden Prairie-Minn.-based EVS Engineer. before moving to Christchurch, New Zealand in 2022. Returned to EVS in 2023, but was able to stay half way around the world in Christchurch thanks to a cloud file sharing service that uses Amazon S3 Storage and allows drawing other film models continuously such as BIMCAD instead of drawing large files such as BIM CAD. download all at once.
Unlike traditional cloud storage tools like Dropbox, which sync and download files locally, Lucidlink is a cloud platform that streams files directly to users. Engineers can open and work with large CAD files as they are streamed. This capability brought EVS and Larson back together with no change in their capabilities and those of other remote workers, other than doing most of their transportation engineering work while their co-workers slept.
“We use it as our primary document storage repository,” says Wally Warwick, IT supervisor at EVS. “For drawings, we do a lot of AutoCAD drawings, for our engineering, all the drawings, DWG files and PDF files and everything that goes into building our final designs is stored in LucidLink.”
One of EVS’ main lines of business is designing utility-scale solar and energy storage projects. Warwick estimates that it reduced file access times from 5 to 10 minutes to less than 30 seconds. This saves EVS engineers more than 200 billable hours each month, says Warwick.
Before adopting LucidLink in 2023, EVS had to manage increasingly remote staff and more complex projects that strained its network connections. “We don’t just have 5 to 10 people who are remote, it’s everyone,” says Warwick.
“There were pretty much two main options for connecting,” Warwick continued. “Either you use the VPN to connect from your machine that’s sitting right in front of you at home, or you move to a desk that’s in the office here, which we did a lot of that … but that also led to a lot of other lag time headaches depending on where people were.”
For Larson, who has been enjoying New Zealand’s natural beauty since coming back aboard, connectivity was her main concern. He says logging into the system is as easy as logging into any computer with two-factor authentication.
“I would say [LucidLink] it’s simple; it’s just another drive on my computer,” says Larson. “I started at EVS just over 10 years ago, and then in 2021, I moved to New Zealand. I quit, moved to New Zealand, worked here for a bit, but then I had the opportunity to come back to EVS. Three years ago, there was a period before I was hired full-time where I was only doing contract work. While doing the project work, I was working with Wally to figure out a system to make this work. This works.”
Larson referred to the period of using remote desktop and VPN before adopting LucidLink as “brutal” by comparison.
Amazon S3 is the same streaming technology that Amazon uses for its Prime Video services and other streaming content services. It helps broadcasters and content owners automate media supply chains and distribute live content to a global audience. Using engineering content such as CAD and BIM files also speeds up EVS work.
As engineering companies increasingly employ remote workers and include international collaborators from markets like India, reliable anytime connectivity is a highly valued commodity. Data storage systems such as EMC Storage Area Network, [SAN] allows users to access their data remotely, but download times have always been a challenge.
“The question was always how do you get to that storage where that storage was beautiful, that we had that EMC SAN, beautiful, except when you weren’t in the office. We took that SAN that NAS and made it globally accessible,” says LucidLink engineer Rich Werhun.
