Ask a municipal engineering manager where their project files live and the answer is usually "in the cloud." Ask which country, and the room gets quieter.
For a lot of Canadian civil teams that question used to have one answer. If you worked in Autodesk's cloud, your project data was stored in the United States. For private-sector work that was rarely an issue. For public-sector owners, utilities and transportation agencies with data residency expectations written into their contracts, it was a recurring conversation with legal and IT, and sometimes a reason to keep everything on a file server.
That has changed. Autodesk now offers Canada as a storage region for the core Forma products civil teams use, including Forma Data Management (formerly Autodesk Docs), Forma Design Collaboration (formerly BIM Collaborate Pro) with Revit Cloud Worksharing, Forma Build, Forma Takeoff and Forma Estimate.
The option exists. What it does not do is move anything for you.
Choosing the Canadian region means your project data — the files, models and project content your teams create and share — is stored in Canada.
Two details matter for anyone writing a data residency clause:
Autodesk asks for the primary storage location when a hub is activated, and that choice can't be switched later. Existing customers can, however, create a new hub in the Canadian region from manage.autodesk.com and run it alongside their US hub.
Because the region belongs to the hub, getting existing projects into Canadian storage means creating them in a Canadian hub and bringing the data across. Autodesk is clear that an entire project can't be migrated from one region to another. Its Replication Tool for Data Management can copy files and folders to a hub in another region, but not versions, issues, markups or permissions, and Forma Bridge does not currently share files between regions.
In practice, that makes a move a planned migration rather than a setting. For a civil team, the planning questions are specific:
Not always. Some civil organizations have good reasons to keep authoring data on-premises in Autodesk Vault, with controlled versioning and Civil 3D dependency management on their own servers, and publish issued deliverables to the cloud for review and distribution. Others run everything in Forma Data Management.
The Canadian region removes one objection to the cloud. It does not decide your data strategy. That decision should come from how your teams actually deliver projects: who authors, who reviews, what gets issued, and what an owner needs to see years after handover.
SolidCAD works with Canadian civil engineering firms, municipalities and infrastructure owners on Civil 3D, Vault and Forma environments. A data residency move touches all three: the authoring tools, the data management model and the cloud setup.
Our Civil Data Management Assessment starts with how your projects are delivered today, then sets out a target environment and a migration plan that keeps Civil 3D data intact. From there, a Civil Document Workflow Pilot tests the move on one live project, and Civil Data Governance & Rollout extends it across the portfolio. If you only need part of that, we can scope it that way.
Yes. Canada is an available storage region for Forma Data Management, Forma Design Collaboration, Forma Build, Forma Takeoff and Forma Estimate.
Project data, yes. Autodesk states that personal data, including identity and hub data, continues to be stored and processed in the US.
No. The region is chosen when the hub is activated. Moving existing projects means bringing their data into a new hub in the Canadian region, which is a migration rather than a setting change.
No. The rebrand from Autodesk Construction Cloud to Autodesk Forma changed product names. Autodesk confirmed no data migration was required and projects stayed where they were.
If a contract, an owner or your own IT team is asking where your project data lives, start with the requirement and one project. SolidCAD can review your current environment and map what a move to Canadian storage would involve.
Prefer email? Reach SolidCAD at info@solidcad.ca.
Book a Civil Data Management Assessment.