IT Support Costs for Engineering Firms in Ontario: What to Expect

ACT360 prices managed IT for engineering firms per user per month under one agreement. The fee covers help desk support, monitoring, patching, security tools, backup management and planning. Microsoft and Autodesk licences, hardware and projects are billed separately.

Per-user pricing suits how engineers work. A project engineer might use a Revit workstation at the office, a laptop in a site trailer and a phone that pulls up markups. Pricing each device would triple that one person’s cost. Counting the person keeps the bill tied to headcount, which is the number principals already plan around.

Full service includes site visits. Most firms need them at some point, because a plotter jammed the afternoon before a submission, or a workstation that won’t post after a graphics driver update, isn’t always a remote fix. Remote-only can work for a small satellite office, or for a firm with someone on staff who handles the hands-on work, which our co-managed IT service is built for.

Headcount sets the base. Design workstations, where project files live, how many offices you run, how much field work there is and what clients ask for in security decide where in the range a firm lands.

• Design and simulation workstations. Revit, Civil 3D, AutoCAD, SolidWorks and ANSYS need graphics drivers, updates and add-ins that work together. A driver update that breaks Revit costs a morning for every designer who installed it.
• Where project files live. A file server or NAS in the office, a cloud platform, or a mix of both. Large models opened by several people at once put real demands on storage and the network.
• More than one office. Each location adds network equipment to manage and a file-sharing setup to keep consistent, so a drawing opens the same way in both.
• Field and site work. Laptops and tablets that live in trucks and site trailers need remote access that works on weak connections, and they get lost more often.
• Software versions and licences. Many firms keep older Autodesk versions installed to open legacy projects. Tracking which version each project needs, and which named user holds which seat, is ongoing work.
• Client and insurer questionnaires. When a client or your cyber insurer asks for proof of MFA, backups and access controls, someone has to produce it.

The first 2 are where an engineering firm’s quote differs most from an accounting office with the same headcount.

More than the IT line on the budget. Multiply the people who can’t work by their billing rate and the hours lost, then add the overtime to recover and any deadline you miss. That total is what the monthly fee protects.

For example, if 12 engineers and designers who bill at $120 an hour lose 2 hours because the project server won’t open, that’s $2,880 in billable time gone before anyone calls the client. These are illustration numbers, so put your own rates in. Then run the same sum for a full day in the week a submission is due.

Outages aren’t only hardware. Statistics Canada reports that about 1 in 6 Canadian businesses (16%) were impacted by a cyber security incident in 2023, that 13% of those reported ransomware, and that recovery spending doubled to $1.2 billion from 2021. For a design firm, the worst version is a live project locked days before it’s due. Our business continuity and disaster recovery page covers how backups are built around project files and tested, not assumed.

The fee should cover the routine work that keeps workstations, project files and accounts running and secure, plus someone planning ahead with you. If a quote sits well below the ranges above, check which of these it leaves out.

• Help desk support from a named contact who knows that a slow Revit model and a slow laptop are different problems.
• Monitoring and patching for workstations, laptops, servers and Microsoft 365, with updates scheduled so they don’t land in the middle of a deadline.
• Endpoint detection and response on every managed device. ACT360 uses Huntress EDR, backed by a 24/7 threat operations team.
• Multi-factor authentication on every account, including the shared logins for plotters, portals and licence admin.
• Backups of project folders and models that get test-restored, not only a report saying the job ran.
• Software and licence management: Autodesk versions, named-user seats, and the add-ins each discipline relies on.
• New-hire setup that doesn’t pull a principal off billable work for two days.
• Quarterly reviews that tie technology spending to utilization, project delivery and growth.

MFA earns its place on that list. Microsoft reports that MFA plus blocking legacy sign-ins stops more than 99.9% of common identity attacks. Our breakdown of what managed IT actually includes goes line by line.

Microsoft 365 licences, Autodesk and other design software subscriptions, hardware, larger projects and cyber insurance usually sit outside the managed IT fee. Budget for them separately so the monthly number stays easy to compare.

• Microsoft 365 licences, billed per user.
• Autodesk and other design software. Autodesk now sells named-user subscriptions, where each person signs in under their own name, so seats follow people rather than machines.
• Workstations, graphics cards, monitors, plotters and network equipment as they reach end of life.
• Projects such as replacing the file server, moving project files to the cloud, or setting up a new office.
• Cyber insurance, which increasingly asks about controls your IT provider manages.

Projects are where the wrong advice costs the most. A 35-person contractor’s previous provider quoted $60,000 to replace a failing server. ACT360 asked what was coming next, learned their accounting system would move to the cloud within a couple of years, and delivered a server sized to bridge to that move for $25,000 including installation and migration. The server right-sizing case study walks through it. The same question applies to an engineering firm deciding between a new file server and moving project files to the cloud.

Time licence changes carefully when headcount moves with project wins. Under Microsoft’s New Commerce Experience policy, most subscriptions can only be cancelled for a prorated refund within 7 days of purchase.

Compare scope first and price second. Two quotes at the same per-user rate can cover very different work, so hold both against the same short list.

1. Who supports the CAD software? Or does the provider stop at Windows and email.
2. How are driver and software updates handled? Scheduled around your deadlines, or pushed to every workstation at once.
3. Are site visits included? If not, what does one cost?
4. How are backups proven? A scheduled test restore of a real project folder, or a green checkmark.
5. Who manages the licences? Autodesk seats, Microsoft 365 and the add-ins.
6. What does leaving cost? Notice periods, early-termination fees and handover terms.

Some providers discount longer terms. ACT360’s published rate doesn’t change with term length, and every Managed IT agreement includes a 90-day exit clause. Our page on managed IT with no long-term contract explains how it works, and our guide to what it costs to switch IT providers covers the rest of the calculation.