Architectural Firms
Managed IT, high-performance storage, and backup for Pacific Northwest architecture and design firms. Built around large files, distributed teams, and deadlines that don’t move.
Revit models that crawl when they live on the NAS, so they end up local on someone’s laptop. Consultants who need the current drawing set, not the one from Tuesday. A render workstation doing the work of three machines with the backup coverage of zero. Project archives that have to come back intact when a client calls about a building you finished six years ago. The pattern underneath all of it: version-sensitive files too large for infrastructure that was never designed for them.
Tell us what’s breaking →The designer’s laptop that died with three weeks of work on it, because the project files were local since the NAS was too slow for Revit. The model that forked into two versions when someone worked offline over a weekend, discovered at the worst possible meeting. The render that ran all night and failed at 6 AM because the workstation filled its disk. The consultant upload portal that bounced a 400-megabyte drawing set the day a submission was due. The archive request for a project from 2019 that turned into a week of searching old drives and one ex-employee’s email.
If any of that sounds familiar, we’ve worked through it before.
The Craftwork Group is a young entity. The people doing the work aren’t. Our team brings more than a hundred years of combined IT experience, doing this work since 1999, across the operational profiles design firms actually face: large version-sensitive files, distributed project teams, and infrastructure that has to perform without a dedicated IT department watching it.
Design-firm IT is a storage and movement problem. The files are large, the versions matter, and the people who need them are split between the studio, the jobsite, and a consultant’s office in another city. Most MSPs treat that as ordinary file serving. It isn’t. Storage has to be engineered for the working set, collaboration has to respect version integrity, and backup has to cover the machines where work actually happens, including the ones under desks that nobody put on the backup schedule.
What working with us actually looks like. Helpdesk opens at 6:30 AM and runs until 5:00 PM, with on-call coverage after hours. Standard SLA is one-hour response; in practice, most calls get answered live as they come in. We treat phone calls as priority because if you’re calling, it’s urgent. The only thing that bumps a live call is a monitoring alert flagging a system down or under attack. We’re often the ones who tell you something broke before you noticed. Often we have it fixed before you’d have called.
A note on the rest of the field. We’ve spent the last few months calling MSPs posing as a buyer to see how the market actually operates. Over seventy-five percent never picked up the phone. None returned the sales inquiry. If you’ve shopped for IT support before, that probably tracks. We don’t work that way.
On the heavy-compute side: we design and run GPU infrastructure in production for AI workloads. Render nodes and GPU workstations are the same engineering discipline: thermals, storage throughput, driver discipline, and backup for machines that are never idle. Built for firms whose hardware works as hard as they do.
Storage engineered for the files your firm actually opens: working-set performance fast enough that models stay on the server instead of drifting onto laptops, version integrity that survives offline edits, and capacity planning that accounts for how project folders actually grow. When the NAS is fast enough, the dangerous local copies stop happening on their own.
Before any of the niche depth matters, the standard MSP work has to be solid. Workstation and server monitoring. Microsoft 365 management. Enterprise-grade firewalls, switching, and Wi-Fi sized for the studio. Backup and disaster recovery with documented recovery drills, not the kind nobody runs until something breaks.
Remote access that performs well enough to use on real project files, not just email. File sharing with consultants and contractors that moves full drawing sets reliably and keeps the current version unambiguous. Access scoped by project, revoked when the project closes, so a consultant relationship that ended last year isn’t still a standing connection into your environment.
Render workstations and GPU hardware specified, monitored, and actually included in the backup schedule. Project archiving with versioned recovery, built for the reality that architecture carries liability tails: when a client or a lawyer asks about a project years later, the record set has to come back complete, not reconstructed from whoever’s laptop survived.
The honest wins are in the project record, not the design: document indexing across years of project history so precedent details are findable, plan-version drift detection across archives, photo classification for site documentation, and reconciliation between project files and the billing system. Hours of administrative work back, every week, without an AI touching a drawing.
What we won’t do: promise AI will design the building or produce your construction documents. That’s not where the economics are honest yet. The right deployment eliminates administrative reconciliation. The wrong one creates new work managing the AI.
Your model choice. Your API keys to OpenAI, Anthropic, or whoever you pick. Your data on infrastructure you own. We configure, deploy, and operate; you keep the keys and the option to take it all elsewhere.
No phone tree. No demo deck. A real conversation about what’s breaking in your firm, what you’ve already tried, and whether there’s a path where we’d actually be useful. If we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you and point you somewhere honest.
If we are a fit, the next step is an operations audit. A half-day on-site, a written assessment of what we’d do and what it would cost, no obligation past that point.
Book the 30-minute call →