IT Guidance for Construction Clients in the Pacific Northwest

Construction companies in the Pacific Northwest run on different infrastructure assumptions than accountants or law firms. The office side needs what every professional services business needs - stable email, shared drives, backups, security. But the field runs on tablets in dusty trucks, phones on job sites where the nearest router is three miles away, and satellite trailers where LTE is the only option. Most managed IT providers understand the first part. They miss the second. That's the problem.

I've watched GCs in Portland provision beautiful office networks - fiber, redundant firewalls, enterprise Wi-Fi that blankets three floors - while their field teams still can't reliably access the schedule on a phone. The office IT gets budgeted like it's critical infrastructure. The field IT gets provisioned like an afterthought. Then the project engineer spends four hours a week manually reconciling field notes that should have synced automatically but didn't because the tablet hasn't successfully connected to the VPN in six days.

Construction IT splits into three layers that need different treatment. Office infrastructure works like most professional services setups. Desktops, email, file servers, the accounting system. That part is well understood. Field connectivity is the harder problem. The foreman on a site in Everett can't VPN back to the Seattle office over LTE that keeps dropping. The superintendent in a trailer in Bend can't wait ninety seconds for a PDF to load. Mobile device management gets complicated when half the devices live in tool boxes and the other half get left on dashboards in July. Then there's the construction-specific software layer - Procore, Viewpoint, Buildertrend, whatever the estimating team uses, whatever the subs are required to submit through. That software often expects connectivity and device capability that the field setup can't deliver.

Most IT providers treat this like a software implementation problem. It's an infrastructure problem first. If the field devices can't maintain connectivity to the systems they're supposed to feed, the software doesn't matter. I've seen expensive Procore deployments crater because nobody validated that the Samsung tablets worked on the job sites where they'd actually be used. They worked fine in the office. They barely functioned in Camas.

What works in the Pacific Northwest specifically: LTE as primary field connectivity, not backup. The geography doesn't forgive spotty coverage. Verizon tends to win in rural areas. AT&T is competitive in metro corridors. T-Mobile is inconsistent outside cities. You need to know which carrier has actual signal where your projects run. Offline-first apps wherever possible. The daily log has to work when there's no connection and sync later. RFI submissions should queue locally. If the app requires live connectivity to function, it will fail in the field. It's not an edge case. It's the normal case.

Mobile device durability matters more than specs. The field destroys hardware. Rugged cases, not regular ones. Screen protectors that survive sawdust. Devices that charge via USB-C so chargers are interchangeable with everything else on site. Device replacement cycles should assume eighteen months, not three years.

Cloud storage works better than on-premise file servers for field access, but the sync clients have to work offline. Dropbox and Box handle this reasonably well. SharePoint's offline mode is inconsistent. Google Drive works but permissions get messy at scale. The core question: can the foreman open the updated plan set on a tablet with no signal? If no, the system isn't field-ready.

Security for construction companies has to account for devices that leave the building and don't come back for weeks. Mobile device management needs remote wipe capability. VPN is necessary for back-office access but often impractical for field devices. The compromise: cloud apps that authenticate directly without VPN, with conditional access policies that enforce MFA and device compliance. Not perfect. Better than pretending the field will VPN reliably.

The best construction IT setups I've seen treat the field as the primary user and provision backward from there. The office can tolerate a little friction. The field can't. If the foreman gives up on the digital daily log and goes back to paper, you've lost. The back office will keep generating reports from incomplete data and nobody will notice until an RFI that was supposed to be filed three weeks ago surfaces during a dispute.

What you should ask a managed IT provider before signing: Have you supported construction companies before? How do you handle field connectivity? What's your plan for mobile device management? Can you support the specific construction software we use, or are you just providing the network? Do you understand that the field's needs are different from the office's, and that if we only solve for the office, we haven't actually solved the problem?

If your current IT setup works fine in the office but fails in the field, let's talk. Contact The Craftwork Group at craftworkgrp.com. We'll start by figuring out what the field actually needs, then build infrastructure that delivers it.