Managed IT for Duncan and the Cowichan Valley.
Valley Edge is based in Port Alberni. There is no Duncan office and this page does not pretend otherwise. What the valley gets is managed IT built for a business running more than one building, staffed by people who are often in neither, and holding records that are not free to live anywhere.
Duncan · North Cowichan · Chemainus · Cowichan Bay · Lake Cowichan · Shawnigan Lake
- Built for more than one site
- Accounts and domains registered to the business
- Data residency asked before the tenant exists
- Remote first, because Highway 1 closes
Few businesses here fit in one building. That is 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 the Municipality of North Cowichan wraps around it. So the office is in town, the yard or the shop is in North Cowichan, the second location is in Chemainus or Cowichan Bay, and a good share of the staff drive in from Shawnigan Lake or Lake Cowichan. Managed IT here is almost never one office to look after. It is three or four places that have to behave like one.
The second building has its own everything
A router bought at the time by whoever was there, a password on the underside of it, and a guest network sharing the same line as the till. Every site added quietly arrives with its own equipment and its own habits. On a managed agreement all of it is inventoried, all of it sits under the same policy, and there is a single 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 somebody starts keeping the working copy locally and emailing it back at the end of the day. That is not carelessness. It is what a file server put in the building where the bookkeeper sits does to everyone else. Moving that into managed cloud storage costs a migration and ends the emailing.
Nobody knows who set up site two
The login for the far building router, the licences somebody bought on a personal card, the printer, the alarm, the account the point of sale signs into. Often the installer has moved on. A takeover starts with finding all of it and writing down who owns it, because the alternative is finding out during an outage.
Staff who are never at a desk
Field crews, drivers, a tasting room, somebody covering two locations on alternating days. Their laptop updates whenever it happens to be switched on and connected. Monitoring that only sees the machines sitting in the office is monitoring pointed away from the machines most likely to be a problem.
Multi-site is the design, not an extra
What ties several buildings into one business is identity, not cabling: one directory, one set of accounts, multi-factor authentication that holds up off the office network, and access granted by role rather than by which room a person happens to be standing in. Each site then gets its own network policy underneath that. It is more work than a single office and it costs more than a single office, and the honest thing is to quote it that way rather than discover 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 much larger job markets, and valley businesses are staffed accordingly: people who live here and work down island, people who commute up from Victoria, and firms that keep a desk in both places. The Malahat is the only road south and it closes — for weather, for collisions, for hours at a time, several times a winter. Any IT arrangement that depends on somebody driving to you is an arrangement that depends on a highway.
- Anything that can be fixed without hands is fixed without hands, because a closure between here and Victoria is an ordinary winter event rather than a disaster plan
- Access is built to follow the person rather than the desk they usually sit at, so a day worked from the wrong side of the hill is a normal day
- A laptop that only behaves properly on the office network is a design fault, and it is one that gets found in the first week rather than in February
- On-site work is booked and batched rather than promised on demand from the far side of two highways
Every line here is a consequence of the geography, and the geography is not going to improve. Building around it is cheaper than 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 significant part of the local economy alongside the school district, health services and the professional practices around them. Organisations like these buy IT under conditions an ordinary small office does not have. What follows is the set of questions those conditions raise. It is not a claim to have answered them for anybody in particular.
Where the data physically sits
A Microsoft 365 tenant can be provisioned with its data at rest in Canada, and that choice is made once, at creation, and cannot be changed afterwards without migrating out. An organisation working under a funding agreement, a health information rule or its own data policy usually has to answer that in writing. It is a five-minute question before a tenant exists and a project afterwards.
Asked first, or asked expensively.
Who can reach what, and who decides
Access granted by role instead of everyone landing in the same folder, a named owner for each system, a list that gets reviewed rather than inherited, and accounts closed the day someone leaves rather than at the next audit. 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 ordinary, checkable access management, done properly.
Reviewed, not inherited.
Records that outlive the software
Retention is a different problem from backup and gets mistaken for it constantly. Backup is a question about last Tuesday. Retention is a question about the ninth year: is the record still there, can anything still open the format it was written in, and was it supposed to have been destroyed by now. An organisation with a records schedule needs the second one designed deliberately, because it does not fall out of the first.
A schedule, not a hard drive.
The valley makes things. Which puts a computer in the barn.
Cowichan is a recognised British Columbia wine region with cideries, farms selling at the gate, and the kitchens and shops that buy from them. From an IT point of view that is not one business. It is a production building, a retail counter and a set of records somebody may one day ask to see, all under a single name and usually on a single network that was never designed for any of it.
- A building put up for equipment, not for a network, where the honest first question is whether a connection can reach the far end of it at all
- 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, because guessing about a building costs a return visit.
- A tasting room or farm gate till that cannot lose a sale while somebody reboots something
- Card terminals, which stay with the payment provider and the bank, on a network segment that is genuinely separate from everything else
- Public wifi that does not share a wire with the machine taking the money
The network separation here is the cheapest item on the page and the one most often skipped.
- Batch, lot and production records living in a spreadsheet only one of the team knows how to find
- A backup of that spreadsheet that somebody has actually restored from at least once
- Label, licence and inspection paperwork stored where it can be produced on request rather than searched for
The record belongs to the business and the rules belong to its regulator. Making the record producible on request is the part that sits on this side.
- Winemaking, production and inventory software itself — that 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 it starts, so nothing turns into an argument about which side of a line it fell on.
No Duncan office. Highway 4, then Highway 1.
Valley Edge is in Port Alberni and works the Island from there. Everything that can be done remotely is done remotely, which is the large majority of a managed agreement, and the physical parts are scheduled. The valley communities the work genuinely reaches are Duncan, North Cowichan, Chemainus, Crofton, Cowichan Bay, Cobble Hill, Mill Bay, Shawnigan Lake, Lake Cowichan and Youbou. That is a service area and nothing more — no second address is claimed here or in the structured data behind this page.
Before we start
The six questions a Cowichan Valley business asks, answered the same way here as they would be 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 is not a second customer, and it is not billed as one — the count is built from the machines, the users and the network at each place. What a second site genuinely changes is the network design: a firewall policy for each building, a decided answer for how the two reach the same files at the same speed, and a decision about whether the far building needs its own connection or a link back to the first.
Our data has to stay in Canada. Can you do that?
The data residency of a Microsoft 365 tenant is fixed when the tenant is created and is not a setting anyone flips afterwards. If a tenant already exists, the first job is establishing where its data actually sits today and putting that answer in writing. If one is being created, the question is asked before, not after. Where the requirement comes from a funding agreement, a professional body or an organisation policy, that document sets the standard and the build is done to it rather than to a default.
Half our staff live down island or work from home. Does that make it harder?
It changes what gets built first rather than how much there is. A business spread between Duncan, Shawnigan Lake and a spare room in Langford needs multi-factor authentication that works from anywhere, patching that does not wait for a machine to come into the office, and files that open at the same speed in Chemainus as they do at the desk they were saved from. Those three are the foundation for a valley business, not the finishing touches.
How quickly can you get here?
Port Alberni to Duncan is Highway 4 and then Highway 1, so a visit is a planned thing rather than a pop-in, and this page is not going to imply a van around the corner. Remote covers the accounts, the mail, the licences, the patching and the permissions, which is where the large majority of what goes wrong actually lives. Anything physical is booked, and a business that needs regular hands on site should have that written into the agreement instead of hoping.
A partner organisation has asked how we handle their data. What are they actually asking?
Usually four things, and all four are answerable without hiring anyone: where the data is stored, who has access and how that list is kept current, what happens to it when the relationship ends, and how long it is kept. Published frameworks set this out plainly — the OCAP principles from the First Nations Information Governance Centre put ownership, control, access and possession with the community whose information it is. Being able to answer in a paragraph is most of the work. Being unable to is what turns a form into a project.
Do you support the software our industry runs on?
Line-of-business software stays with the vendor who publishes it, whether that is a winery production system, a clinic record system or a shop till. What a managed agreement takes on is the ground underneath it: the hardware, the sign-in, the connection it depends on, an export-based backup where the product allows one, and ownership of the vendor call so it does not fall to whoever is standing nearest. Which applications are treated that way is listed in the agreement, settled before it matters.
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 will tell you what tying that together takes and what has to be decided before anything moves.
info@valleyedgeconsulting.io · 778-488-8618