Soter Engenharia modernizes infrastructure and reduces latency by 93% with Skyone

Migrating to the cloud eliminated the weaknesses of an in-house data center and shielded the construction company's operations a year before the pandemic

After years of operating its own in-house data center—and the associated risks—Soter Engenharia, a high-end construction and real estate development company, decided to migrate its entire IT infrastructure to the cloud. The project, undertaken in partnership with Skyone, a Brazilian scale-up specializing in cloud computing, data, artificial intelligence , and cybersecurity, reduced network latency by 93% and, months later, would prove to be the right decision at the worst possible time to fail: the arrival of the pandemic.

An in-house data center, two warnings that could not be ignored

Until 2019, all of Soter's data operations depended on an on-premise Data Processing Center (DPC), meaning physical servers maintained within the company itself, without cloud redundancy.

Two incidents raised the alarm: in 2018, a power outage on the day eSocial documents were to be submitted hampered the construction company's labor obligations; shortly afterward, the data processing center itself suffered damage caused by third parties, exposing how much the operation depended on a vulnerable physical structure.

“We needed a robust, secure, and predictable solution,” summarizes Liliane Maltez Garcia, IT manager at Soter Engenharia.

From decision to migration, without halting the work or the office

The most common fear in any infrastructure migration is the same: operational downtime.

Between August and October 2019, Soter migrated seven servers to the Autosky cloud, from Skyone, hosted in an Oracle environment in Brazil, with a cybersecurity module — including a firewall, reinforcing the protection of the new environment.

In practice, the transition only took three hours of downtime, well below the initial estimate of at least a week for a migration of this size.

The real test came with the pandemic

The most visible technical gain was the drop in network latency, from 132 milliseconds to 9 milliseconds — a 93% reduction that made the team's daily work significantly faster.

But the real stress test came months later: in March 2020, with the pandemic forcing companies to close offices overnight, Soter managed to maintain 100% of its operations working from home without impacting the business, something unthinkable with the old local structure.

The company also stopped relying on manual machine-by-machine updates, expanded the use of digital , and reduced document printing.

"Today, we don't need a robust IT team to take care of the infrastructure," says Liliane.

Why has the construction industry become a priority target for cyberattacks?

Soter's case reflects a broader trend in the sector.

Information security experts point to the construction industry as one of the sectors most targeted by criminals today, attracted by a particular combination: high-value payments between construction companies, developers, and suppliers; operational urgency that pressures teams to resolve any incident quickly to avoid halting a project; and lean IT teams that don't always have the structure to monitor threats around the clock.

Cybersecurity industry reports have already documented ransomware ransom demands reaching up to R$2 million in attacks on companies in the sector.

The scenario is likely to gain even more weight as the sector grows: Brazilian civil construction advanced 2.9% in the first quarter of 2026 and was the second activity that generated the most formal jobs in the country between January and April, with 143,500 vacancies — 20.5% of the total national balance, according to CBIC (Brazilian Chamber of the Construction Industry).

More construction projects, more hiring, and more data in transit mean, in practice, more surface area to protect.

For Soter, the lesson learned was clear: the security and stability of operations ceased to be an IT issue and became part of the construction company's own ability to deliver projects on time—even in scenarios that no one anticipated.

Written by Skyone