Watch: Cloud technology transforming geotechnics

Bentley’s senior director of geotechnical information management Scott Devoe started the session off with an industry overview on what’s happening in the field of information management. He used the Bentley Open Ground solution as an example of going from traditional desktop products to cloud-based solutions, particularly highlighting geotechnical information.

“Cloud technology is transforming every industry,” he said. “Certainly, we're all using cloud technology today, at least to a certain extent. Now in terms of global cloud data centre traffic, there's a term that they use; they measure this traffic in exabytes. What's an exabyte? It's a billion gigabytes. Measuring things in exabytes is an interesting way to view how much data is being transformed and input into the cloud.”

To begin with, Devoe wanted to focus on the geotechnical sector’s biggest data challenges.

“We're going to start today by talking about what it means to be connected. Now, traditional desktop applications are by definition disconnected data environments; you're putting things into a singular database, a personal database on a PC somewhere, and that data has to be transferred either through PDF files, by sending things through Excel, or some other transfer mechanism,” he said.

“Now in the geotechnical industry, we're looking at those disconnected parts being the SI planning, extensive site exploration, the samples that we're trying to get to a laboratory, doing modelling and visualisation, or getting that data to engineering analysis. Those parts have always been traditionally disconnected; we're always just sending transfer files from one to the other. Now what we've done with Open Ground is bring everything together into a connected data environment. That's iterative, incremental, responsive; it’s optimal.”

He explained that when the data is collected in the field, it now goes directly into the cloud, and project stakeholders can then review it.

“Following those samples, we understand where they go, who created them; we can present borehole logs, fence diagrams, and these are always showing the current or active version of the data. We can integrate now with analysis and modelling. So, you can see this is truly now a connected data environment; you're confident that that data that you're visualising, wherever you're visualising it, is up to date, accurate.”

Microsoft Azure specialist Andy Hassett covered the technology platform side, including talking about compliance, global access and data security. Bentley Systems has built its cloud offering on the Microsoft Azure platform.

“We proactively collaborate with customers and regulators across the world to make sure that you know, whatever industry, whatever regional government agencies are in effect, that we've done the hard work to make sure that our underlying processes, platforms, locations are secure,” he said.

“Here in the United States, for example, we have the federal or Gov Cloud, that is a very restricted set of capabilities in terms of who has access to what, how those people who even have access are vetted and authenticated by the FBI. And that's just one example.”

Engineering and design company Atkins is currently working on a global database for geotechnical data and linking things up as part of the building information management (BIM) workflow. The company was also invited to beta test what is now Bentley Open Ground.

We've been taking advantage of the capabilities of the cloud environment to establish a single source of truth or ground data for use in various related software packages.

Atkins engineering geologist Vicky Corcoran said: “Even with the beta test version, the advances of cloud computing for us were obvious, and that led us to adopting it as soon as we possibly could. An immediate benefit was the cloud version of software ran significantly faster, because all the data processing was undertaken in the cloud. And that meant our users were much more likely to make use of that software in their day-to-day work.

“Client adoption also meant that there was no longer requirement to maintain our own database servers for geotechnical data. We also made use of the additional freedom the cloud offers us in terms of collaboration with our clients and contractors."

Atkins chief geotechnical engineer Simon Miles added: “More recently, we've been taking advantage of the capabilities of the cloud environment to establish a single source of truth or ground data for use in various related software packages.

“This has enabled us to streamline our design processes and make better use of the data that we have.”

Site investigation specialist Geotechnical Engineering Ltd is also busy collecting data, but is still in the early phases of its digital transformation.

The company’s engineering technical manager Emma Leivers said: “We started on our cloud journey just before lockdown last year. We're always looking for better way to do things in all aspects of our business, and our main driver for migrating to the cloud is that the desktop-based application that we were using made it quite difficult to share data between the people who needed it and quickly.

“So that was the easy part - deciding to migrate. And we find the challenging aspect was how to go about it with minimum disruption. And we found that the best long-term plan for us was to cultivate our skills internally with help from the support team of our software and cloud provider.”

When asked about remaining roadblocks to achieving a higher level of digital maturity, Miles noted: “Key challenges, I think, are currently linking together the various organisations that are involved in our data journey, to make it as seamless as possible.

“It's all very well investing in state-of-the-art systems, but if for various organisations, the other two ends of the data journey aren’t able to interact with it, then there's a problem. And sort of, related to that is having the time, money and resources available to create the data connections between the various software packages that use the data.”