Managed IT for Campbell River and the sites past it.
Campbell River is where the Island's office economy ends and its field economy starts. Half of what needs looking after up here is on a boat, in a truck, in a camp or in a shop with one bar of signal. We run it remote first from Port Alberni, and book site days when something needs hands on it.
Remote first from Port Alberni · site days booked ahead · scoped in writing
- Sign-in blocked, all sessions revoked9:14 am
- Mailbox converted to shared, office manager given access9:16 am
- Licence removed, back in the pool9:21 am
Front desk printer says offline again. Nobody touched it.
It picked up a new address after the power blip. Fixed it remotely and pinned it so it stays put. Try printing now.
Printing. Thank you!
- Devices and sites, not seats
- Every crew member signs in as themselves
- Built to ride out a dropped link
- Restores tested, not assumed
Five places, and one of them looks like an office.
Ask a north Island operation how many computers it has and you get the town office. The estate that matters is spread across a yard, a fleet, a set of sites and a crew, and most of it never shows up on a seat count.
The town office, the easy part
Dispatch, payroll, accounts, safety and whoever is chasing invoices. A few desks, a printer that jams, Microsoft 365, and often a server holding the drawings, the scale tickets and one piece of software older than the person running it. We inventory it, patch it, protect it and test the restores. It's also the smallest, least risky part of the estate, so a provider who only sells this part is selling you what you already had covered.
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 stolen out of a cab, and they hold the inspection photos and the day's records. Encryption, remote wipe and a device you can swap in an afternoon without losing anything matter far more here than anything you could do to a desktop.
The camp, the barge and the site trailer
One satellite dish or microwave link feeding a whole crew, network gear nobody on site can reconfigure, and power off a genset with all a genset's habits. If a system can only be fixed by someone standing in front of it, it doesn't work at a site you reach by water taxi. We build for that.
The shop and the yard
A machine running vendor software that can't be patched because the vendor won't support the patched version, hardware attached to it that cost more than a truck, and no upgrade path this fiscal year. The answer is almost never "replace it". We put it where neither the internet nor the office network can reach it, and write down why.
The people who never log in, until they have to
Fallers, deckhands, drivers, site crew. Half the payroll has no account until safety training, a timesheet app or a certification tracker needs one, and then thirty accounts get made in a week by whoever's free. That week is where shared passwords, personal email addresses and accounts nobody closes come from. We make that week boring.
Supply ends here. The work does not.
Campbell River is the last town on the highway with a hospital, an airport, freight and a real trades base. North and west of it the vendor list gets short fast, and off the road system it's gone. Every IT decision up here should start from that.
What is past the staging town
- 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
That list is why a spare on site is cheaper than a charter, and why a plan that assumes someone can drive out tomorrow isn't a plan.
Three decisions that are expensive here and free in a city.
None of these is an IT question in the usual sense. They're business decisions that show up looking like IT ones, and each is cheaper to make on a quiet Tuesday than in the week it forces itself on you.
One connection, or two?
A second path at a site (another carrier, a cellular failover, a satellite link behind a wired one) costs a modest amount every month. A day when the crew can't file, the office can't dispatch and nobody gets invoiced costs whatever your day costs. You already know one number. We'll look up the other.
Work out the day rate first.
Who owns the kit at the site?
The router at the camp went in four years ago. Nobody has the password, nobody knows whose account the service bills to, and the firmware hasn't been touched since. It's the most common finding on a first inventory of a field operation, and finding it is worth more than most of the work after 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 photos, sometimes years back. Retention is a business rule, so we set it as one, on purpose, with a stated period. A record that only lived on a tablet that went in the water isn't a record.
Retention is a decision, not a default.
What is inside it, and where it deliberately stops.
A field agreement isn't the office agreement with more devices bolted on. The covered list is different, the quoted list is longer, and the line around industrial equipment gets drawn in writing before anything starts.
Covered on the agreement
- 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
Quoted separately
- 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
Outside what we do
- 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
What you get in writing
- Remote first from Port Alberni, with site days booked and quoted ahead
- The response commitment that applies, written into the agreement before work starts
- A named list of every device, identity and site we look after
- Accounts, licences and domains in your company's name, never ours
- Accounts, tenants and passwords in your name, so leaving us is a handover
Per-seat pricing assumes a seat. Count devices, identities and sites instead.
The real question up here isn't a five-year technology roadmap. It's what you're paying for, what it covers, and what happens the week the link goes down. Three counts answer most of it.
Take a company with eight desks and forty people. Price it per seat against the desks, and the agreement covers a fraction of the estate while every field problem comes back as an extra. Price it against the payroll, and you pay office rates for thirty people whose whole relationship with IT is a shared tablet and a timesheet. Both numbers are wrong.
So we count three things. Devices: how many machines are managed, how many leave the yard, and which can't be replaced quickly. Identities: how many people need to sign in as themselves, which is usually far more than the desks and far fewer than the payroll. Sites: how many locations have their own connection and gear, because a site costs the same to look after whether one crew or fifteen work out of it.
Those counts also make failure planning obvious, and that's worth more than the pricing. Devices tell you what the spare shelf holds. Identities tell you how big the offboarding backlog is. Sites tell you exactly how many single points of failure you're carrying. It's usually fewer than people fear and more expensive than they expect.
From there the plan is short and finite: which systems keep working with no connection at all, what the crew does during an outage instead of standing around, which gear gets scheduled for replacement instead of waited on, and what the first hour of a bad morning looks like, on one page. We plan it against your operations calendar, not the fiscal one, because the season decides which week can't break.
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.
A backup has to come back out.
The useful question is whether a restore works when a crew needs the file. This illustrative console makes the schedule, what is covered and the restore-test history visible in one place.
Campbell River, run from Port Alberni.
About two hours north on the Inland Island Highway. Most of the agreement runs remotely, and site days are booked ahead.
The questions that come up first
What north Island operations ask us first, answered the way we'd answer on the phone.
Do you actually come up here?
Yes, for work that's physical, booked as a site day rather than a call-out. Everything that can be done over a connection is done over a connection. Up here that's how work keeps moving in 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. Satellite handles mail, chat and our management tools fine and struggles with anything that expects a stable, low-latency link. So we decide which systems may depend on the connection, and make sure the rest slow down quietly instead of failing at the worst moment.
Our crew shares one tablet and one login. Is that really a problem?
Yes, and mostly not for security reasons. With a shared login, the inspection, the timesheet and the photos are signed by nobody in particular, so your audit record can't say who did the work. Individual accounts on a shared device take a morning to set up and don't slow a crew down.
We run software the vendor supports. Do you touch it?
We manage the machine under it, keep it patched and reachable, and deal with the vendor so a support case doesn't eat your dispatcher's afternoon. The application stays with whoever supports it. Where that line sits goes in the agreement, so nobody discovers it during an outage.
What about the server in the town office?
It gets inventoried, monitored, patched, backed up and restore-tested like everything else. It also gets a straight conversation about whether it still needs to exist. Plenty of north Island offices run a box that holds one folder of drawings and one program. Sometimes we keep it, sometimes we retire it.
Do you cover the communities north and west of Campbell River?
Remotely, yes, and that's where remote first stops being a preference and becomes the only plan that works. On site, it's a booking and a real conversation about travel: a day in Port Hardy is a day, and a site off the road system is a charter, not a drive.
Start with the site that keeps going dark.
The camp with one link, the tablets nobody can account for, or what an agreement should actually cover for an operation like yours. Tell us what a day down costs you, and we'll tell you what fixing it takes.
Book a call