Best Remote CAD Setup for Architecture Firms

The COVID legacy

Nobody debates whether architects can work remotely anymore. That's settled. Your team already does — from home, from satellite offices, from client sites. Consultants dial in from wherever they are.

What's worth examining is whether your setup has moved on from 2020. Most haven't, or are up for a fefresh. Firms threw something together during COVID — VPNs, laptops, a remote desktop tool someone found — and never revisited it.

It worked well enough. But "well enough" has a cost: slow syncs, version conflicts, consultants who take weeks to onboard, project data on devices you don't control.

There are better options now. The question is which one fits how your firm actually operates.

More than a decade ago, I was building VDI solutions for CAD applications like Siemens NX at a joint venture between VMware, EMC, and Atos, selling them to companies that make planes, trains, and automobiles. Before that, more than a decade at Siemens PLM. After, an executive role at PTC. That experience is why Designair exists today: we know remote technology, and how to make it work with CAD.

Designair resells 2 Desktop software soluitions: Splashtop and Amazon DCV. We have almost a decade experience with Azure, and run a fully self-service DaaS platform purpose-built for BIM and CAD since 2023. We know all five options in this guide inside out. That breadth is what allows us to be neutral about which one fits your situation.

Working outside the building

Before diving into solutions, it's worth stepping back. What does "distributed CAD and BIM work" - the fancy word for working with tools like Revit and ArchiCAD outside of the building - actually mean for an architecture firm?

Remote and hybrid staff is the obvious one. Your own people, working from home part or all of the week. This is how you keep your best people when they want flexibility, and how you hire talent that doesn't live within commuting distance.

But it's not just people working from home. There are three other situations worth considering:

• Satellite offices — teams in other locations, collaborating on the same models. This lets you staff projects with the right people, not just whoever happens to be in the right building.
• Freelancers and external consultants — brought in for specific projects or peaks. This is how you scale for a competition deadline or a sudden workload spike without carrying overhead year-round.
• Nearshore teams — routine drafting and modelling work done by teams in lower-cost locations. This is how you relieve cost pressure without compromising quality on the work that matters most.

Each of these is someone working outside the building.

But only if the setup works.

When it doesn't, you lose all of it. The flexibility becomes friction. The talent pool shrinks back to commuting distance. The consultants you brought in to accelerate the project spend their first two weeks fighting access issues.

Three problems show up repeatedly:

Version chaos. Different Revit versions across projects. Files that won't open. Central models that corrupt because someone synced from the wrong build. Hours lost to troubleshooting instead of designing.

Onboarding friction. A new consultant should be productive in minutes. Instead, it takes weeks — shipping hardware, waiting for VPN credentials, configuring software, downloading files that timeout halfway through. By the time they're up and running, you've burned a chunk of your schedule buffer.

Network drag. Slow file opens. Sync-to-central that takes fifteen minutes. Save operations that hang. For anyone outside the building, working on a large model feels like wading through mud.

And then there's security. Project data on laptops you don't control. VPN access for externals that your IT department — and increasingly, your clients — would rather not allow. Files copied to personal machines with no audit trail. WeTransfer becoming a shadow digital twin of your project data. Those ironclad NDAs with consultants will not scare away North Korean hackers. The further work moves from the building, the less visibility you have over where your data actually lives.

But we have Autodesk BIM 360?

At this point, someone will mention the Autodesk Collaboration Cloud — or whichever Common Data Environment is in use. "Our files are already in the cloud. Problem solved."

Not quite. A CDE solves the data side: files are centralised, versioned, accessible from anywhere. That's genuinely useful. But it doesn't give anyone a workstation. Your consultant in Porto still needs a machine powerful enough to run Revit. Your hybrid employee still syncs to a laptop that may or may not have the right software version. The CDE holds the model. It doesn't run it.

Half the problem is solved. The other half — the 3D modelling tools, the compute, the consistent environment — is what this guide is about.

The five options

There are five ways to give people outside the building access to CAD and BIM tools. Each involves trade-offs. None is universally right or wrong — it depends on your situation.

1. VPN

A virtual private network connects remote machines to your office network. The user works on their own laptop or workstation; the VPN provides a secure tunnel to your files and servers. It's cheap to set up and familiar to IT departments. Most firms start here.

2. Remote Desktop (Splashtop, DCV, Parsec)

The user connects to a physical machine back at the office and controls it remotely. The work happens on your hardware; only the screen image travels over the internet. It's simple to understand and works well enough for many teams.

3. VDI on-premises (Citrix, VMware Horizon)

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure runs multiple virtual workstations on servers in your own data centre. Users connect remotely to their own virtual machine. You control everything — the hardware, the software, the security.

4. AVD / AppStream (cloud, self-managed)

Azure Virtual Desktop and AWS AppStream move the virtual machines to a hyperscaler's cloud. You don't own the hardware, but you still manage the environment — the images, the provisioning, the configuration, the support. It shifts capital expenditure to operating expenditure and removes the data centre overhead.

5. DaaS (fully managed, Vagon, ShadowPC and Designair)

Desktop as a Service hands the entire workstation problem to a provider. You don't manage infrastructure, images, or GPU provisioning. Users log in; it works. The provider gives you a self-service portal and handles the complete stack up to the support tickets.

Which one fits?

There's no universal answer. The right choice depends on how your firm actually operates. A few questions worth asking:

How big is your typical project team? Some options only make sense at scale. Others work at almost any size.

How long does a typical project take? A six-month job has different requirements than a multi-year programme. Some setups are quick to spin up and wind down. Others take months to get right but pay off over time.

Own people or externals? If everyone works for you, the calculus is different than if you regularly bring in consultants, freelancers, or nearshore teams. How quickly do you need to get someone productive? How easily do you need to revoke access when the project ends? And for your own people: mostly office-based, hybrid, or fully remote?

How many locations? A single office with hybrid staff is a different problem than four offices across two continents collaborating on the same models.

Where does your data live? If you're all-in on ACC, that's one consideration. If your files live on a local server — and need to stay there — that's another.

What are your security requirements? Some clients mandate specific controls. Data must stay in certain locations. Access logs must be auditable. Laptops with project files are not acceptable.

What are your compliance obligations? Defence work, government contracts, critical infrastructure — these come with regulatory requirements that may rule out certain options entirely.

Who manages IT? A firm with a dedicated IT team can take on more complexity. A firm where the most technical person is "whoever's good with computers" needs something simpler.

What's your budget? Upfront capital or monthly spend? Predictable costs or pay-as-you-go? The answer shapes which options are even on the table.

The answers to these questions narrow the field. Often considerably.

Finding the right fit

We're building a tool that walks through these questions and shows which options match your situation. It's not ready yet. If you'd rather not wait, book a call with me and we'll work through it together.