Managed IT for Duncan and the Cowichan Valley.
Most valley businesses run out of more than one building, with staff who are often in neither and records that can't live just anywhere. We tie all of it into one setup, remote first from Port Alberni, with site days booked ahead.
Duncan · North Cowichan · Chemainus · Cowichan Bay · Lake Cowichan · Shawnigan Lake
- 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!
- Built for more than one site
- Accounts and domains in the business's name
- Data residency settled before the tenant exists
- Remote first, because Highway 1 closes
Few businesses here fit in one building. That's the IT problem, before anything else.
The City of Duncan is about two square kilometres, one of the smallest incorporated cities in the country, and North Cowichan wraps around it. So the office is in town, the yard is in North Cowichan, the second location is in Chemainus or Cowichan Bay, and half the staff drive in from Shawnigan Lake or Lake Cowichan. Managed IT here is three or four places that have to act like one.
The second building has its own everything
A router bought by whoever was there at the time, the password stuck underneath it, and a guest network on the same line as the till. Every new site shows up with its own gear and its own habits. We inventory all of it, put it under one policy, and give you one answer to who can reach what from where.
Files that live on a desktop in the other yard
The shared drive is quick in the office and slow at the second site, so someone keeps the working copy on their desktop and emails it back every evening. That's what a file server in the bookkeeper's building does to everyone else. Moving it to managed cloud storage takes one migration and ends the emailing.
Nobody knows who set up site two
The login for the far building's router, licences bought on a personal card, the printer, the alarm, the account the till signs into. Usually the installer has moved on. A takeover starts with finding all of it and writing down who owns it. The alternative is finding out during an outage.
Staff who are never at a desk
Field crews, drivers, a tasting room, someone covering two locations on alternate days. Their laptop updates whenever it happens to be on and connected. Monitoring that only watches the office machines is pointed away from the ones most likely to cause trouble, so ours follows the device.
Multi-site is the design, not an extra
Identity is what ties several buildings into one business, not cabling: one directory, one set of accounts, multi-factor that works off the office network, and access by role instead of by room. Each site gets its own network policy underneath. It's more work than a single office, so we quote it that way up front instead of discovering the second building halfway through.
Victoria one way, Nanaimo the other. Your staff are split, so your IT is too.
Duncan sits on the Trans-Canada between two bigger job markets, and valley businesses are staffed that way: people who live here and work down island, people who commute up from Victoria, firms with a desk in both. The Malahat is the only road south and it closes for weather and collisions, for hours, several times a winter. IT that depends on someone driving to you depends on a highway.
What that actually changes
- Anything that can be fixed without hands gets fixed without hands, so a closure is an ordinary winter day, not a disaster plan
- Access follows the person, not the desk, so a day worked from the wrong side of the hill is a normal day
- A laptop that only behaves on the office network is a design fault, and we find it in the first week, not in February
- On-site work is booked and batched, not promised on demand from the far side of two highways
Every line here comes from the geography, and the geography isn't changing. Building around it beats being surprised by it twice a year.
Not every record is free to live anywhere. The valley has more of those than its size suggests.
Cowichan Tribes is one of the largest First Nations bands in British Columbia, and band administration, health, education and social organisations are a big part of the local economy, alongside the school district, health services and the practices around them. These organisations buy IT under rules an ordinary office doesn't have. These are the questions those rules raise, and how we handle each one.
Where the data physically sits
A Microsoft 365 tenant can keep its data at rest in Canada, but that's chosen once, when the tenant is created, and changing it later means migrating out. Organisations under a funding agreement, a health information rule or their own data policy usually have to answer it in writing. It's a five-minute question before the tenant exists and a project after.
Asked first, or asked expensively.
Who can reach what, and who decides
Access by role instead of everyone in the same folder, a named owner for each system, a list that gets reviewed instead of inherited, and accounts closed the day someone leaves. The OCAP principles, published by the First Nations Information Governance Centre, put ownership, control, access and possession with the community whose information it is. The IT side of that is plain, checkable access management, done properly.
Reviewed, not inherited.
Records that outlive the software
Retention gets mistaken for backup constantly. Backup is about last Tuesday. Retention is about year nine: is the record still there, can anything still open its format, and should it have been destroyed by now? If you work to a records schedule, we design retention on purpose, because it doesn't fall out of backup.
A schedule, not a hard drive.
The valley makes things. Which puts a computer in the barn.
Cowichan is a recognised BC wine region, with cideries, farms selling at the gate, and the kitchens and shops that buy from them. For IT that's three things under one name: a production building, a retail counter and a set of records someone may ask to see, usually on one network that was never designed for any of it.
The production side
- A building put up for equipment, not a network, where the first question is whether a connection can even reach the far end
- Machinery and sensors that belong on their own segment and are usually sharing one with the office
- Staff who need a sign-in and a device that works in a place made of concrete and steel with nowhere to sit
This is where a site survey earns its keep. Guessing about a building costs a return visit.
The counter
- A tasting room or farm-gate till that can't lose a sale while something reboots
- Card terminals stay with the payment provider and the bank, on a network segment that's actually separate
- Public wifi that does not share a wire with the machine taking the money
Separating the network here is the cheapest item on the page and the one most often skipped.
The records
- Batch, lot and production records in a spreadsheet only one person knows how to find
- A backup of that spreadsheet that has actually been restored at least once
- Label, licence and inspection paperwork stored where it can be produced on request rather than searched for
The record is yours and the rules are your regulator's. We make sure the record can be produced on request.
What is not covered
- Winemaking, production and inventory software itself, which belongs to the vendor who publishes it
- Payment card compliance, which is set by the payment provider and the card brands
- Anything the agreement does not name, which is why the agreement names things
Written down before we start, so nothing turns into an argument about which side of a line it fell on.
Records need a way back.
A second location does not help if its shared files cannot be restored. This illustrative console shows the backup scope and the tests that prove a restore can be done.
Duncan and the valley, from Port Alberni.
We work the Island from Port Alberni. Most of a managed agreement is done remotely, and the physical work is scheduled. In the valley that covers Duncan, North Cowichan, Chemainus, Crofton, Cowichan Bay, Cobble Hill, Mill Bay, Shawnigan Lake, Lake Cowichan and Youbou.
Before we start
What Cowichan Valley businesses ask us first, answered the way we'd answer on the phone.
We have an office in Duncan and a yard in North Cowichan. Is that one agreement or two?
One agreement. A second location isn't a second customer and isn't billed as one; the count comes from the machines, users and network at each place. What a second site does change is the network design: a firewall policy per building, a plan for both reaching the same files at the same speed, and a call on whether the far building gets its own connection or a link back to the first.
Our data has to stay in Canada. Can you do that?
Yes. A Microsoft 365 tenant's data residency is fixed when it's created, not a setting you flip later. If you already have a tenant, the first job is finding where its data sits today and putting that in writing. If you're creating one, we settle it first. Where the requirement comes from a funding agreement, a professional body or your own policy, we build to that document, not to a default.
Half our staff live down island or work from home. Does that make it harder?
It changes what gets built first, not how much there is. A business spread between Duncan, Shawnigan Lake and a spare room in Langford needs multi-factor that works anywhere, patching that doesn't wait for a laptop to come into the office, and files that open as fast in Chemainus as at the desk they were saved from. For a valley business, those three are the foundation.
How fast can you get here?
Port Alberni to Duncan is Highway 4, then Highway 1, so a visit is planned, not a pop-in. Remote covers accounts, mail, licences, patching and permissions, which is where most problems actually live, and support runs the same business day. Anything physical is booked. If you need regular hands on site, we write that into the agreement.
A partner organisation has asked how we handle their data. What are they actually asking?
Usually four things, all answerable without hiring anyone: where the data is stored, who has access and how that list stays current, what happens to it when the relationship ends, and how long it's kept. The OCAP principles from the First Nations Information Governance Centre put ownership, control, access and possession with the community whose information it is. Answering in a paragraph is most of the work. Not being able to is what turns a form into a project.
Do you support the software our industry runs on?
Line-of-business software stays with its vendor, whether it's a winery production system, a clinic record system or a shop till. We take on everything under it: the hardware, the sign-in, the connection, an export-based backup where the product allows one, and the vendor call, so it doesn't land on whoever's standing nearest. The agreement lists which applications get that treatment.
Tell us how many buildings it is.
The office, the yard, the second location, and the people who are at none of them today. We'll tell you what tying it together takes and what has to be decided first.
Book a call