Corstorphine & Wright
Customer: Corstorphine & Wright
Offices: Nationwide
Adoption: 2026
How Inevitech gave Corstorphine & Wright’s Defence design team a high-performance virtual desktop platform supporting the practice’s Secure by Design environment for Ministry of Defence work
Corstorphine & Wright is one of the UK’s most established architectural practices, an AJ100 Top 15 practice and trusted to deliver in technically and operationally demanding sectors, including blue-light, justice and defence projects. That trust comes with a condition: the infrastructure behind the work has to be governed to the same standard as the buildings themselves.
In 2026, Corstorphine & Wright deployed a dedicated Inevitech environment for its Ministry of Defence design teams. High-spec, GPU-powered virtual workstations, delivered alongside highly resilient Infrastructure-as-a-Service, support Corstorphine & Wright’s Secure by Design environment while giving the team excellent rendering and modelling performance to evolve their overall design estate, a combination of Inevitech virtual workstations (high performance, GPU accelerated VDI) and legacy physical workstations. Security and capability were both non-negotiable, not one at the expense of the other.
Jonathan Carthy, Head of IT at Corstorphine & Wright, explains why the requirement mattered, and what the infrastructure now lets the team do.
Designing for technically and operationally demanding environments
“When you’re working on Ministry of Defence facilities, security isn’t a feature you add later,” says Carthy. “It has to be built in from the start, or the work doesn’t happen at all.”
Corstorphine & Wright’s reputation is built on design quality across sectors, and its Ministry of Defence commissions sit among the most technically and operationally demanding in that portfolio. They came with a specific procurement requirement: any supporting technology infrastructure had to meet Secure by Design principles, the Ministry of Defence’s approach to embedding cyber security throughout the lifecycle of a capability or service, rather than adding it after the build. But the brief went further than compliance. The environment also had to keep the team’s design and visualisation work moving at full pace.
“We needed a partner who understood that Secure by Design isn’t a checkbox,” David Singh, Defence Director states. “It’s a set of principles you have to demonstrate at the system architecture level. And it still had to work at a performance level our architects demand.”
What Secure by Design requires
Secure by Design is the Ministry of Defence’s approach to embedding cyber security throughout the lifecycle of a capability or service, from planning through to operation. It is not a product certification. It is an assurance approach, covering risk management, access control and recovery, assessed on evidence rather than paperwork. For organisations working on Ministry of Defence programmes, meeting it is a condition of the contract, not a differentiator.
A dedicated, governed environment
Inevidesk provides an important part of the solution, particularly the high-performance virtual desktop and compute capability, within a wider Secure by Design environment that also comprises Corstorphine & Wright’s own security controls, technologies, governance and assurance activities. Inevitech worked closely with Jonathan and his team to configure the platform to the security requirements defined by that wider programme, drawing on the granularity of control available across Inevitech’s independently developed virtual and hosted services. The overall environment was subject to independent security testing as part of Corstorphine & Wright’s own assurance work, with findings addressed through the associated remediation and assurance process before sign-off. A dedicated pool of hosted GPU-powered virtual desktops was provisioned for the project team, alongside scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service, all within a secure private network separated from the practice’s wider technical estate.
Key elements of the deployment included:
- Locked-down firewall configuration, restricting traffic to approved hosts and ports only
- Access controls and environment segmentation supporting the wider Secure by Design assurance requirements
- Dedicated virtual compute resources, combining flexibility of allocation with dedicated power for evolving and demanding workflows
“The environment had to be secure in ways a standard project never would be,” says Carthy. “Inevitech worked closely with us to accommodate the security and performance requirements we identified. Their responsiveness was particularly valuable because the environment had to evolve as our assurance work progressed.”
Performance that keeps pace with the work
Locking an environment down was one critical part of the brief. The other was to ensure the project team could always work at a high level of performance in BIM and visualisation. Thankfully, Corstorphine & Wright already had this assurance having previously deployed Inevitech’s virtual workstations and IaaS for other projects.
“We had already used Inevidesk for demanding design workloads, so we knew the platform could deliver the GPU performance required by our design and visualisation applications,” says Carthy. “That gave us confidence that increasing the security controls around the environment did not have to mean compromising the user experience.”
Tried and tested performance gives the practice a repeatable technical foundation capable of supporting future projects with comparable security requirements, subject to the assurance requirements of each commission:
- Rapid provisioning of new virtual workstations in minutes from pre-figured templates
- Centralised oversight and configuration control from a single management portal
- GPU, CPU and RAM reallocated in minutes as project demands change, so the environment responds and enables evolving workflows rather than inhibiting them
Security and design excellence, engineered together
Corstorphine & Wright’s ability to take on technically and operationally demanding briefs is itself a marker of the practice’s standing. Meeting Secure by Design requirements without compromising the performance its design teams rely on gives the practice a repeatable technical foundation for future projects with comparable security requirements, subject to the assurance requirements of each commission.
“Good design doesn’t just apply to the buildings we help create,” Carthy concludes. “The technical infrastructure behind our designers needs to be just as considered. Inevitech gave us a high-performance, flexible platform that we could integrate into the wider security architecture and governance needed for Defence work. That has allowed us to strengthen security without losing sight of what the technology is ultimately there to do: enable our people to deliver great design.”