Stabilising a 90-person engineering firm — and protecting its IP.

An engineering firm's drawings, calculations, and project history are the business. When the systems holding them are slow and fragile, every engineer pays the tax — and the company's most valuable asset, its intellectual property, sits one failure away from trouble.

The challenge

The firm had grown to 90 people on IT that hadn't kept up. A single aging on-prem server held the CAD files, the project archive, and the domain — with backups that hadn't been tested in over a year. The network was flat and open: any device could reach anything, and former contractors still had accounts. Large design files opened slowly across the office, and a mid-afternoon server hiccup could stall a dozen engineers at once.

Two risks stood out. First, downtime — outages were frequent enough that people had stopped reporting them. Second, and more serious, their IP: a ransomware hit or a failed disk could have taken years of design work with it, and there was no verified way to get it back.

What we did

• Rebuilt the core, without overspending. Their previous quote called for a full forklift server replacement. Instead we re-platformed onto right-sized, monitored infrastructure and moved the file workload to fast, resilient storage — keeping what was healthy and replacing only what wasn't.
• Locked down identity. We cleaned up Active Directory, removed stale and contractor accounts, enforced MFA, and applied least-privilege access so people reach only the projects they should.
• Segmented the network. Engineering, guest, and operational traffic were separated, and the firewall and switching were brought under monitored management.
• Made backups real. Automated, encrypted backups with copies kept off-site in Canada — and, critically, tested restores on a schedule, so "we have backups" became "we have proven we can get everything back."
• Put eyes on it 24/7. Monitoring now catches a failing disk or a creeping capacity problem before it becomes an outage.

The results

Within the first quarter, the unplanned outages stopped. File access got fast enough that engineers quietly got back roughly six hours a week they'd been losing to spinning progress bars and restarts. The firm's IP is now protected by tested backups and least-privilege access — a story their clients and their insurer were glad to hear. And by re-platforming instead of ripping and replacing, they avoided about $140,000 in unnecessary hardware spend.

"We didn't realise how much the old setup was costing us until it stopped happening. It's just… quiet now — and we finally trust our backups."

— Operations Director, product-engineering firm (Burnaby)