IndustriesOil & gas
Field offices on one bar of signal, contractors who come and go, and drawings nobody can afford to lose.
Oil and gas services and engineering firms run head office in Calgary and everything else somewhere with a satellite dish. The IT has to work in both places, the access list changes every week, and an hour of downtime during an active program is paid for by the hour.
What breaks
What breaks when half the company is in the field.
The field office shares one link with the crew's phones
Files time out, the VPN drops during a sync, and the newest revision of a drawing sits on a laptop that has not connected since Tuesday. Head office assumes everyone is working from the same version. They are not.
A subcontractor needs the project folder today and must lose it the day the contract ends
Access gets granted by whoever is around and revoked by nobody. Six months later a former contractor still has a login to the shared drive, and the client's security questionnaire asks who can see their data.
Survey data, drawings and well files live on a shared drive with no versioning
Someone saves over the current revision, or a laptop with the only copy of a survey goes into a ditch. The work exists, once, on one machine.
Downtime during a program costs money by the hour
A crew waiting on a permit PDF or a drawing they cannot open is still being paid, and the client is still counting the day. The response time has to match what an hour is worth on site.
Laptops live in trucks
Devices get lost, stolen and left in the cab overnight. Without encryption and remote wipe, a lost laptop is a lost client dataset, not a lost laptop.
The software you run
We look after what it runs on.
Engineering, survey and field ticketing software, licensed to particular machines, running over connections the vendors never planned for. We keep the machines, accounts and links it depends on working.
The vendor supports the application. We manage the machines, accounts, network and backups it depends on, and we make the call to the vendor so you do not have to.
- Engineering and drawings
- AutoCAD and Civil 3D, Bluebeam Revu, and the licence servers they check in with
- Survey and GIS
- ArcGIS and QGIS, survey processing tools, large datasets that need to sync without clogging the site link
- Field operations
- Field ticketing, LEM and safety software on tablets and phones, Procore or similar for project controls
- Collaboration
- Microsoft 365 with SharePoint and Teams, structured so a project folder can be shared with a contractor and closed again
- Connectivity
- Starlink and LTE routers at remote sites, site-to-site VPN back to head office, failover between them
- Accounting and ERP
- Sage, QuickBooks or an industry ERP, integrated with field ticketing so hours are entered once
Software commonly used in Oil & gas.
A scenario, not a case study
A field office loses its link at 3am, mid-program.
Suppose a Calgary engineering services firm with forty staff, a head office and a field office near Grande Prairie, three weeks into a program with two subcontractors on site.
This is an illustration of how the service works in a business like yours. It does not describe a client.
- 3:10am
The satellite link at the field office drops. Our network monitoring sees the site go dark and, a minute later, sees the LTE failover fail to pick up. A critical ticket opens on its own.
- 3:22am
Our on-call engineer confirms the failover router has hung, power-cycles it remotely and brings the site back on LTE. The crew is asleep and never knows.
- 7:00am
The site lead opens the current drawing set from SharePoint. It is the same revision head office signed off at 6pm, because the drawings live in one library with version history, not on individual laptops.
- 9:15am
The client emails a security questionnaire asking who can access their data. The answer is the access report from the project folder: every account, contractor or staff, with dates.
- 4:00pm
One subcontractor's contract ends. Their access to the project folder, Teams channel and VPN is revoked from the help desk the same hour, and the report shows it.
- Month end
The monthly report shows the 3am outage, how long the site ran on LTE, the tickets, and a recommendation to replace the failover router before the next program.
What we would put in place
What we would put in place for a field-based firm.
The network and the access model do most of the work. Everything else is the same flat-rate managed IT.
Network infrastructure
Site-to-site VPN, LTE and satellite failover, and monitoring so a field office going dark is our ticket, not your morning.
Read about network infrastructureCloud & Microsoft 365
A SharePoint structure where each project has one library with version history, shareable with a contractor and closable when the contract ends.
Read about cloud & microsoft 365Cybersecurity
MFA on every contractor account, encrypted and remotely wipeable laptops, and the evidence a client questionnaire asks for.
Read about cybersecurityBackup & recovery
Drawings, survey data and project files backed up continuously with an immutable copy, and restore-tested monthly.
Read about backup & recoveryIT support
Same-hour offboarding for contractors and a 15-minute critical response when a site is down.
Read about it supportDocument & data AI
Field inspection reports summarised and routed the day they are filed, with anomalies flagged.
Read about document & data ai
The package we usually recommend
Professional
- per user, per month
- from $125–155
Network monitoring and 24/7 threat hunting are in Professional, and both matter when sites are remote and contractors come and go. Firms with several sites or client compliance requirements usually move to Enterprise for the network management and compliance reporting.
Final pricing depends on environment complexity, compliance requirements and support scope, and is confirmed after the IT audit.
Fair questions
What oil & gas businesses ask us.
- Our field sites have no real internet.
- They have some, and we design for the worst of it. Files that must be available offline are synced ahead of time, the link is monitored, and failover is tested before the program starts rather than during it.
- Contractors bring their own laptops.
- Then they get a contractor account with MFA, access to the one project folder they need, and an end date. What they can reach is decided by the account, not by the laptop.
- Our engineering software is licensed to specific machines.
- Most is. We document which licences live where, keep those machines patched on a schedule that respects the program, and handle the vendor when a licence server misbehaves.
- We already have an IT person at head office.
- Good. Co-managed IT puts our network monitoring, after-hours cover and security stack behind them, and they keep the parts they want.
Book a free IT audit.
No obligation and no pitch deck. We look at what you have, tell you what is wrong with it, and you decide what to do with that.
- A full inventory of your devices, accounts and licences
- A written list of the security gaps we find
- What your current setup is costing you against a flat per-user rate
Prefer to talk? Get in touch