Construction technology has a shape that generic I.T. advice keeps missing. Your workforce is wherever the work is. Half your “office” is a trailer that relocates every few months. Your project data lives in whatever mix of apps your PMs and your GC’s requirements produced. Your bank wires amounts that make a criminal’s month. Advice written for a company of desks does not survive contact with any of that.
We provide I.T. support for construction companies, including a 28-person firm whose numbers are published on our pricing page. Here is what the job actually consists of.
Wire Fraud Is the Construction Threat Model
Every industry gets phished. Construction gets phished by people who understand draw schedules. The scam pattern, covered in detail in our email security article, lands harder here because the industry’s normal operations look exactly like the attack. Large wires go to a rotating cast of subs and suppliers. Payment instructions genuinely do change. Everyone is in a hurry.
The attack itself is quiet. Someone compromises one mailbox, yours or a sub’s, and reads for a few weeks. Then a payment application arrives from a vendor you actually owe, for an amount matching the schedule of values, with new bank details. Every part of it is real except the account number.
Any change to payment details gets verified by phone, at a number already on file, before money moves. No exceptions for urgency, familiarity, or the GC breathing down your neck. Attackers plan around the Friday afternoon before a draw deadline, because that is when nobody makes the call.
Managing Field Devices on Real Jobsites
The jobsite runs on phones and tablets: plans, RFIs, daily logs, photos, and timecards. Project data and company email therefore live on devices that ride in truck cabs, get left on tailgates, and often belong to employees rather than the company.
Banning personal devices fails in construction. Managing them works. Mobile device management puts a fence around company data on whatever device carries it. Encryption gets enforced, screen locks become mandatory, and when a phone goes missing or a foreman joins a competitor, the company data gets wiped remotely while the family photos stay untouched. Pair that with a real offboarding checklist, because construction’s project-based hiring creates more comings and goings than almost any other industry. Every departure that skips the checklist leaves a working login behind.
Connectivity is the other half of field reality. A jobsite trailer needs business-grade internet the week it lands, not after a six-week ISP saga. Cellular-based networking with a proper firewall, built as a repeatable kit, means every new site starts secure. The alternative is someone’s phone hotspot and a consumer router from a big-box store.
Taming Construction App Sprawl
Estimating lives in one product, project management in another, accounting in a third. Then each contract arrives with its own GC-mandated platforms. Every app is another login, another place project data lives, another thing nobody configured with security in mind. The industry does not allow full consolidation, but three moves contain the sprawl:
- Put single sign-on and enforced MFA in front of everything that supports it. Access then ends in one place when a person leaves.
- Decide where the authoritative copy of project records lives. When a dispute reaches arbitration three years from now, “somewhere in one of the apps” will not serve you.
- Back up the cloud apps that hold contract-critical data. A vendor’s uptime guarantee is not a backup of your data. That distinction becomes visible at the worst possible time.
What Downtime Really Costs a Construction Company
When a 28-computer firm’s systems stop, the visible cost is office payroll. The larger costs hide behind it: the draw that does not go out, crews idling while plans will not open, and the liquidated damages clock running on the schedule. Construction’s downtime math is why hourly break-fix support, compared honestly against the alternatives here, fits the industry so badly. The model bills by the hour at exactly the moment your business is losing money by the hour.
The construction firm on our pricing page came to us from hourly break-fix. They believed they had 20 users; the real count was 28. No MFA, inconsistent backups, and a network open to whatever the jobsites plugged in. The rebuild was ordinary work done in order: identity and MFA first, then tested backups, then managed field devices, then the jobsite connectivity kit. Their monthly cost went up. What stopped: surprise bills, mystery outages, and the quiet fear attached to every wire.
Where to Start
Fix three things this quarter. Enforce MFA on email and banking. Adopt the phone-verification rule for payment changes. Restore-test the backup behind your payment applications. All three are cheap, and together they close the paths that actually hurt construction firms.
This quarter
For the fuller picture, our construction industry page covers how we work with firms like yours. The three-minute self-assessment will show where you stand across all nine areas before you talk to anyone, including us.