Managed IT for Campbell River, and the sites past the end of the road.
Valley Edge is in Port Alberni, roughly two hours south. Campbell River is where the Island's office economy thins out and its field economy takes over. Most managed IT is designed around a floor of desks and priced by the seat. A working share of what needs looking after up here is on a boat, in a truck, in a camp, or in a shop with no reliable signal.
Remote-first, on site by arrangement, and no north Island office claimed
- Devices and sites, not just seats
- Individual logins on shared kit
- Designed to survive a dropped connection
- Restores tested, not assumed
Five places, and only one of them looks like an office.
Ask a resource-economy business how many computers it has and you will get a number that describes the town office. The estate that actually matters is spread across a yard, a fleet, a set of sites and a crew, and four fifths of it never appears on a seat count.
01 · The town office, which is the easy part
Dispatch, payroll, accounts, safety and whoever is chasing the invoices. A handful of desks, a printer that jams, Microsoft 365, and often a server or a network drive holding the drawings, the scale tickets, the site records and one piece of software older than the person operating it. This part is ordinary managed IT and it gets ordinary managed IT: inventoried, patched, protected, backed up, restore actually tested. It is also, on most north Island books, the smallest and least risky piece of the estate, which is why a provider who only sells this part is selling you the part you were already handling.
02 · The truck, the skiff and the quad
A phone and a rugged tablet that together are somebody's whole computer. They get dropped, soaked, left on a tailgate and occasionally stolen out of a cab. They also hold the inspection photos and the day's records. Encryption, remote wipe, and a device that can be replaced in an afternoon without losing what was on it matter far more here than anything you could do to a desktop.
03 · The camp, the barge and the site trailer
One satellite dish or one microwave link feeding a whole crew, no networking equipment anybody on site is able to reconfigure, and power that comes off a genset with the habits a genset has. A system that can only be fixed by somebody standing in front of it is not a system that works at a site reached by water taxi.
04 · The shop and the yard
A machine running vendor software that will not be patched because the vendor does not support the patched version, hardware attached to it that cost more than a truck, and no realistic upgrade path this fiscal year. The answer is almost never "replace it". It is to put it somewhere it cannot be reached from the internet or from the office network, and to write down why.
05 · The people who never log in, until they must
Fallers, deckhands, drivers, site crew. Half the payroll has no account at all until safety training, a timesheet app or a certification tracker demands one, and then thirty identities are created in a week by whoever is free. That week is where shared passwords, personal email addresses and accounts nobody ever closes all come from.
Supply ends here. The work does not.
Campbell River is the last community on the highway with a hospital, an airport, freight and a real trades base. North and west of it the vendor list gets short quickly, and off the road system it stops existing. That single fact should be visible in every IT decision a business up here makes.
- North on the highway: Sayward, Woss, Port McNeill, Port Hardy, and the camps in between
- West over the pass: Gold River, Tahsis, Zeballos and the inlets they open onto
- Off the road entirely: Quadra, Cortes, Read, Sonora and the Discovery Islands, reached by water taxi, boat or float plane
- On the water: vessels, barges and tenders that are workplaces with schedules of their own
- The tide, the weather and the season, which decide when anybody gets anywhere at all
None of that is a service-area boast. It is the reason a spare on site is cheaper than a charter, and the reason a plan that assumes somebody can drive out tomorrow is not a plan.
Three decisions that are expensive here and free in a city.
None of these is an IT question in the usual sense. All three are business decisions that arrive dressed as IT ones, and all three are cheaper to make on a quiet Tuesday than during the week they force themselves.
One connection, or two?
A second path at a site — a different carrier, a cellular failover, a satellite link behind a wired one — costs a modest amount every month forever. A day when the crew cannot file, the office cannot dispatch and the customer cannot be invoiced costs whatever a day costs you. The decision is not technical. It is a number you already know set against a number you can look up.
Work out the day rate first.
Who owns the kit at the site?
The router at the camp was installed by a contractor four years ago. Nobody has the password, nobody knows whose account the service is billed to, and the firmware has not been touched since. This is the most common finding on any first inventory of a field operation, and the discovery itself is worth more than most of the work that follows it.
If nobody knows, that is the finding.
What will an audit ask you for?
Inspection records, training certificates, maintenance logs, chain-of-custody and photographs, sometimes years back. Retention is a business rule and it gets configured as one — deliberately, with a stated period — rather than being whatever a default sync setting happened to keep. A record that exists only on a tablet that went in the water is not a record.
Retention is a decision, not a default.
What is inside it, and where it deliberately stops.
A managed agreement for a field business is not the office agreement with more endpoints on it. The covered list is different, the quoted list is longer, and the boundary around industrial equipment has to be drawn in ink before anything starts.
- Every managed machine and every managed field device, tablets included
- Individual identities for crews, including on kit that is shared by design
- Microsoft 365, mail flow, licensing against real headcount, and offboarding on the day
- Endpoint protection, encryption and remote wipe on anything that leaves the yard
- Backup with a restore somebody has actually run, and a stated retention period
- Remote support, and monitoring of the links and equipment we are given access to
- Travel to sites north or west of Campbell River, and anything off the road system
- Cabling, mounting, radio alignment and physical installation work
- Standing up a new camp, site office or vessel from nothing
- Migrations, replacements and anything that is a project rather than a month
- Cases the software vendor has to lead, where our part is holding the case open
- Process control, PLCs and anything driving machinery
- Marine electronics, navigation and vessel safety systems
- Scales, sensors and calibrated instruments, which belong to whoever certifies them
- Licensed electrical work of any kind
- Anything requiring a ticket or certification we do not hold, which is said on the call rather than three weeks in
- There is no office, depot or vehicle stationed on the north Island
- No overnight or weekend watch is stated, because the honest hours are not settled yet
- No response target appears until one is written into an agreement
- No vendor badge, partner tier or certification is listed, because none is verified here
- No north Island customer is named, and no rating or uptime figure is published
Per-seat pricing assumes a seat. Count devices, identities and sites instead.
The strategy question a north Island business actually has is not "what is our five-year technology roadmap". It is "what are we paying for, what does it cover, and what happens the week the link goes down". Three counts answer most of it.
Take a company with eight desks and forty people. Priced by the seat against the desk count, the agreement covers a fraction of the estate and every field problem arrives as an extra. Priced by the seat against the payroll, the company is charged office rates for thirty people whose entire relationship with IT is a shared tablet and a timesheet. Both numbers are wrong, and the argument about which one is less wrong tends to run for a year.
Counting three things separately makes the conversation short. DEVICES: how many machines are actually managed, of which how many leave the yard, and which ones cannot be replaced quickly. IDENTITIES: how many humans need to sign in as themselves, which is usually far more than the desk count and far fewer than the payroll. SITES: how many locations have their own connection and their own equipment, because a site is a fixed cost to look after whether one crew or fifteen work out of it.
Those three numbers also make the failure planning obvious, which is the part that is worth more than the pricing. A device count tells you what a spare shelf should hold. An identity count tells you how bad the offboarding backlog is. A site count tells you exactly how many single points of failure the business is carrying, and it is normally a smaller number than people fear and a more expensive one than they expect.
From there the planning is ordinary and finite: which systems must keep working with no connection at all, what the crew does during an outage instead of standing around, which equipment is old enough to be scheduled for replacement rather than waited on, and what the first hour of a bad morning looks like written on one page. None of that requires a consultant with a framework. It requires somebody to sit down with the operations calendar rather than the fiscal one, because the week that must not break is set by the season, not by the quarter.
The full managed agreement, tier by tier, is set out on the main page for managed IT and support across Vancouver Island, and the geography behind all of it is on the Vancouver Island coverage page.
The questions that come up first
Six questions asked on nearly every north Island call, answered here the way they are answered on the phone.
Do you actually come up here?
For work that is genuinely physical, by arrangement and booked as a day rather than a call-out. Everything that can be handled over a connection is handled over a connection, which on the north Island is not a cost-saving measure so much as the only approach that works during a week when the weather has stopped the boats.
Our site runs on satellite and nothing else. Is that a problem?
Not by itself. It changes the design rather than ruling it out. Satellite is fine for mail, chat and a management agent and unhappy about anything that assumes a stable low-latency link, so the work is deciding which systems are allowed to depend on the connection and making sure the rest degrade quietly instead of failing at the worst moment.
Our crew shares one tablet and one login. Is that really a problem?
Yes, and not mainly for security reasons. A shared login means the inspection, the timesheet and the photo evidence are all signed by nobody in particular, so the record you produce for an audit cannot say who did the work. The fix is individual accounts on a shared device, which takes a morning to set up and does not slow a crew down.
We run software the vendor supports. Do you touch it?
We manage the machine underneath it, keep it patched and reachable, and hold the relationship with the vendor so a support case does not become your dispatcher's afternoon. The application itself stays with whoever supports it. Where that boundary sits is written into the agreement rather than discovered during an outage.
What about the server in the town office?
It gets inventoried, monitored, patched, backed up and tested like anything else, and it also gets an honest conversation about whether it still needs to exist. Plenty of north Island offices are running a box that holds one folder of drawings and one piece of software, and the answer is sometimes to keep it and sometimes to retire it.
Do you cover the communities north and west of Campbell River?
Remotely, yes, and that is where remote-first stops being a preference and becomes the only sensible plan. On site, it is a booking and a real conversation about travel, because a day in Port Hardy is a day, and getting to a site off the road system is a charter rather than a drive.
Start with the site that keeps going dark.
The camp with one link, the tablets nobody can account for, or a straight answer on what an agreement should actually cover for an operation like yours. Tell us what it costs you when it stops.
info@valleyedgeconsulting.io · 778-488-8618