IT SUPPORT FOR ENERGY AND INDUSTRIAL BUSINESSES
The people who need it most are rarely at a desk
Consultancies, technology developers and project businesses in energy and heavy industry share a problem that office-bound companies do not. The work is project-shaped and distributed, the documents are commercially sensitive, and the people handling them are senior enough that nobody wants to tell them to raise a ticket and wait.
WHAT TENDS TO BE TRUE
The pattern we see in this sector
Intellectual property that would hurt to lose
Test data, process details, trial results, commercial terms with partners and licensees. Not the sort of thing that appears in a ransomware headline, and precisely the sort a competitor or counterparty would find useful. What protects it is unglamorous: who can reach which document library, what happens when a partner's consultant is given access, and whether that access ends when the project does.
Travel is treated as normal, because it is
Conditional access assumes that anyone who signs in from one country will either be blocked or switched off. It has to be set up around how the business actually operates, which means knowing where people genuinely go.
External collaborators, constantly
Joint ventures, licensees, testing houses and specialist consultants all need access to something, usually at short notice. Done properly, that means guest access with an expiry and a review. Done as most businesses do it, it means files emailed around and a shared drive nobody has audited in three years.
A small head office carrying a disproportionate load
Often, a handful of people in the UK support operations and partners elsewhere, with no internal IT and no appetite for it. That is exactly the shape of business this is built for.
WHAT WE DO
The managed service, plus the things this sector needs
Day-to-day support, Microsoft 365 administered properly, devices enrolled and encrypted, patching, monitoring, backup in your own name, and the sixteen-control security standard applied without exceptions.
Alongside it, the specifics: external sharing set up so that collaboration is possible and reviewable rather than one or the other; conditional access built around genuine travel patterns; document libraries structured so permissions are something you can explain to an auditor; and a leaver and end-of-project process that actually removes access.
We work best with businesses of roughly ten to fifty people running on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace with no internal IT team.
WHAT IT COSTS
£450 / month minimum
Managed support starts at £450 a month, plus your Microsoft licences, which you buy directly from Microsoft in your own name. What you pay depends on how many people you have and what needs putting right. At the start, a team of fifteen is £1,250 a month on our Core service.
Managed service rates. Other arrangements are priced separately.