IT support for construction companies fails in a way that office IT rarely does: not with a slow laptop, but with a site cabin that cannot reach the drawing register on the morning of a concrete pour. The people who need the systems most are the furthest from the server room, and they are working somewhere that did not exist last year and will not exist next year.
This guide is written for UK contractors, subcontractors, housebuilders and fit-out firms with roughly 30 to 250 people. It covers what a construction business actually needs from an IT partner — site connectivity, Microsoft 365 licensing that reflects a split workforce, identity and device control for a workforce that changes weekly, and the record-keeping duties that now sit in statute rather than in good practice.
Every legal and published figure below was read off source on 22 August 2026: the Building Safety Act 2022, the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 and the Limitation Act 1980 on legislation.gov.uk, the Construction Leadership Council’s golden thread guidance, HMRC’s Construction Industry Scheme rules, the DSIT Cyber Security Breaches Survey, Ofcom’s Connected Nations 2025 report, Microsoft’s published UK price list and UK Finance’s fraud reporting. Where a number is modelled rather than read off a page it is labelled modelled and the working is shown.
The worked example throughout is a UK regional contractor with 90 people — 30 in head office and 60 based on six live sites — because that split is where the licensing, security and connectivity decisions actually bite. Sector guides for neighbouring industries sit alongside this one: IT support for property management and IT support for hotels cover the same questions for different estates. What we deliver day to day sits on our managed IT services page.
Table of contents
- Why IT Support for Construction Companies Is a Different Discipline
- The Six Places IT Support for Construction Has to Reach
- What the Building Safety Act Golden Thread Demands From IT Support for Construction
- Site Connectivity: The Ground IT Support for Construction Cannot Skip
- Microsoft 365 for Construction: Licensing Office and Site Differently
- Identity, Devices and Conditional Access on a Live Site
- The Common Data Environment and Why a File Share Fails
- Payment Notices, Adjudication and the IT That Carries Them
- CIS, Payroll and the Records HMRC Expects
- Cyber Security and IT Support for Construction: What the Numbers Say
- Invoice Fraud and the Subcontractor Payment Run
- Data Retention: Fifteen Years, Not Six
- What Good IT Support for Construction Costs in the UK
- Choosing IT Support for Construction: A Buyer’s Scorecard
- Frequently Asked Questions About IT Support for Construction
- References and Further Reading
Why IT Support for Construction Companies Is a Different Discipline
Most IT providers price and design for a business that sits in one building, which is why IT support for construction so rarely arrives fit for purpose. Construction breaks that model on the first day of every project, and the gap is not a detail — it is the whole job.
IT support for construction starts away from the office
A contractor’s revenue is earned on sites the IT team has never visited, in buildings with no power on the ground floor and no structured cabling anywhere. IT support for construction has to treat the head office as the smallest part of the estate rather than the centre of it.
Every site is a temporary branch office
A site cabin needs a connection, a firewall, printing, a phone route, identity for a dozen people and a way to get large files in and out. IT support for construction has to deliver all of that within days of the hoarding going up, and remove it cleanly at handover. That is a branch office build and teardown, repeated several times a year.
The workforce turns over faster than the systems around it
Subcontractors arrive for six weeks and leave. Agency site managers cover two projects at once. Designers from three different practices need the same model. Standard joiner-mover-leaver processes assume employment; IT support for construction needs a process that assumes appointment.
The sector is overwhelmingly small businesses
Construction was the largest UK sector by business count at the start of 2025, with roughly 885,000 small and medium-sized enterprises — about 16% of all UK SMEs. That matters because the security and record-keeping duties described below apply in full to firms with no internal IT function at all, which is why outsourced IT support for construction carries so much of the load.
The regulator now expects an electronic record
Since 1 October 2023 the Building Safety Act regime has required a golden thread of building information to be held electronically for higher-risk buildings. Compliance is now partly an information-management problem, which means IT support for construction firms is inside the regulatory perimeter rather than adjacent to it.
The Six Places IT Support for Construction Has to Reach
Before any licensing or security decision, IT support for construction needs an honest count of the locations. Most contractors discover they are running six distinct computing environments and only paying attention to one.
Counting the estate IT support for construction must cover
The table below is the estate for our 90-person contractor. Each row has its own connectivity, its own device population and its own way of failing, and a provider who only quotes IT support for construction against the first row is quoting for a different business.
| Location | Typical connectivity | Devices | Identity need | How it fails |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Head office | Leased line or FTTP | Laptops, desk phones, print | Full staff accounts | Single circuit, no failover |
| Site cabin | 4G or 5G router, sometimes FTTP | Shared PC, printer, tablets | Named plus shared accounts | Consumer hotspot, no firewall |
| Site gate and welfare | Cellular or cabin Wi-Fi | Access terminals, cameras | Operative records | Unpatched appliance on a flat network |
| Vans and mobile | Mobile data only | Phones, rugged tablets | Personal named accounts | Lost device, no wipe capability |
| Design supply chain | Their networks, not yours | External workstations | Time-limited guest access | Drawings emailed as attachments |
| Client and PM systems | Client-hosted portals | Browser access | Federated or invited accounts | Shared logins nobody owns |
The row that gets forgotten
Site gate and welfare systems are almost always bought by operations, installed by the supplier and never told to IT. They hold biometric or card data about every operative on site, they sit on whatever network was nearest, and they are frequently the oldest unpatched thing in the business, yet they rarely appear in any IT support for construction scope document.
Why the count changes the price of IT support for construction
A quote that assumes one location and 90 users will be cheaper than a quote that assumes seven environments and a mobilisation cycle. It will also be wrong. Ask any prospective partner to price the estate as counted, not as described.
What the Building Safety Act Golden Thread Demands From IT Support for Construction
The golden thread is the clearest example of a construction duty that lands squarely on IT. It is a statutory requirement about how information is stored, shared and kept current, and therefore an IT support for construction obligation — which is a systems specification wearing a safety hat.
What it is and when it started
The Building Safety Act 2022 introduced a requirement to create, hold and hand over building safety information for higher-risk buildings in an electronic format. The duties apply across design, construction and occupation, and the construction-phase duties came into force on 1 October 2023.
The eight attributes, and the control that delivers each
Construction Leadership Council guidance sets out eight attributes the golden thread must have: accessible, accountable, accurate, electronic, secure, transferable, understandable and up to date. Each one maps onto something IT support for construction either provides or does not.
| Attribute | What the guidance requires | The IT control that delivers it |
|---|---|---|
| Accessible | Provided as soon as reasonably practicable to those who need it | Permissioned repository, not personal mailboxes |
| Accountable | Changes recorded with who changed it and when | Version history and immutable audit logging |
| Accurate | Clear change control over information and triggers | Approval workflow with enforced check-in |
| Electronic | Kept in an electronic format, no software prescribed | A named system of record, not a shared drive |
| Secure | Secure from unauthorised access | MFA, conditional access, least privilege |
| Transferable | Shared electronically without loss or corruption | Open formats plus verified export routine |
| Understandable | Comprehensible to the intended reader | Naming standards and enforced metadata |
| Up to date | Kept current to evidence ongoing compliance | Retention and review schedule with owners |
No format is prescribed, and that is the trap
The guidance is explicit that no particular format or software is required, only that information is managed and stored effectively. Firms read that as permission to carry on with folders on a file server. It is not — the eight attributes above are the actual test that IT support for construction has to satisfy, and a folder tree fails accountable and accurate on the first audit.
Who carries the duty
During design and construction the client must provide an electronic facility for the information, and the principal designer and principal contractor must keep it current. At completion the record passes to the accountable person. Every one of those handovers is an export, an import and a permissions change that IT support for construction teams have to execute without losing data.
The practical starting point for IT support for construction
Pick one system of record per project before mobilisation, write the naming and status convention down, and make the export test part of practical completion rather than a discovery six months later.
Site Connectivity: The Ground IT Support for Construction Cannot Skip
Nothing else in IT support for construction works if the cabin cannot get online. Connectivity is the first design decision and the one most often left to whoever has a spare mobile hotspot.
What the coverage numbers mean for IT support for construction
Ofcom’s Connected Nations 2025 reporting puts 4G at 96% of the UK landmass, with rural landmass at 94%. Outdoor 5G from at least one operator reaches 97% of premises, and 83% of the UK has access to 5G standalone.
The gap that ruins a programme
Those are excellent national figures and they are irrelevant to the one site that sits in the gap. The uncovered share is 4.00% of UK landmass for 4G and 6.00% of rural landmass — and greenfield construction is disproportionately rural. A single site in that 6.00% will consume more IT support for construction hours than the other five combined.
Four ways IT support for construction gets a site online
Fixed fibre to the cabin is best where the programme is long enough to justify the lead time. Cellular routing with an external antenna covers most sites. Bonded multi-network routing covers marginal sites. Satellite covers the genuine notspots. Pick per site, at mobilisation, from a survey rather than a map.
Survey before you order
Good IT support for construction begins with a five-minute signal test at cabin height, at the position the cabin will actually stand, which is worth more than any coverage checker. Coverage maps model outdoor signal; a steel cabin behind a concrete core is not outdoors in any useful sense.
The cabin needs a real firewall
A consumer hotspot gives you no logging, no segmentation, no remote management and no way to separate the site camera from the site manager’s laptop. A small business router with cellular failover and remote administration costs a fraction of one day of standing time.
Segment the cabin network from day one
Cabin staff, site Wi-Fi for operatives, cameras and access control, and any client-supplied kit should be on separate networks. This is the cheapest security control available on a construction site and it takes about twenty minutes at install.
Microsoft 365 for Construction: Licensing Office and Site Differently
Licensing is where the split workforce in IT support for construction becomes a spreadsheet. The Microsoft 365 Business plans are not interchangeable, and buying one of them for everybody is either wasteful or unsafe — usually both at once.
The published UK prices behind IT support for construction
Microsoft’s UK price list, read on 22 August 2026, gives Microsoft 365 Business Basic at £5.40 per user per month, Apps for business at £9.80, Business Standard with Copilot at £18.10 and Business Premium with Copilot at £24.60. All are annual-commitment prices excluding VAT.
The 90-person worked example
Our contractor has 30 office staff and 60 site-based staff. Site staff are 66.67% of the headcount, which means the site licensing decision is the larger part of the bill and the larger part of the risk. Three shapes are worth modelling.
| Shape | Office (30) | Site (60) | Monthly | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Premium everywhere | £24.60 | £24.60 | £2,214.00 | £26,568.00 |
| Premium plus Standard | £24.60 | £18.10 | £1,824.00 | £21,888.00 |
| Premium plus Basic | £24.60 | £5.40 | £1,062.00 | £12,744.00 |
What the cheap seat quietly removes from IT support for construction
The Basic shape saves £13,824.00 a year, or 52.03% of the all-Premium bill. What it removes is the security tier — the advanced identity controls, the device management and the endpoint protection that Business Premium carries. It removes them from the 66.67% of the workforce that works outside a controlled building, which is exactly the wrong two-thirds.
The shape most contractors should buy
IT support for construction should put Business Premium in front of anyone who handles money, contracts, design data or personal data, and a lighter plan only in front of roles that genuinely need nothing more than mail and Teams. Then buy the security add-ons for those lighter seats separately rather than pretending they are not needed.
Frontline plans and the shared cabin device
Microsoft’s frontline plans exist for exactly this population. The F1 plan carries no mailbox at all, which makes it right for a shared welfare-unit kiosk and wrong for a site manager. F3 adds mail and web and mobile apps. Decide per role, not per site.
Do not licence a person twice
A site engineer with a phone and a cabin login is one person, one identity and one licence. Duplicate accounts created because “the cabin PC needed its own login” are the most common avoidable line on a construction licence bill.
Identity, Devices and Conditional Access on a Live Site
Identity is the control plane of IT support for construction, because construction people change faster than construction systems do. Getting it right removes most of the security work that would otherwise be done badly later.
One identity per person, subcontractors included
Every human who touches your data needs a named account with multi-factor authentication. Shared cabin logins defeat the golden thread’s accountability requirement, defeat any investigation and defeat leaver control. If a shared device is genuinely needed, share the device, not the identity.
Guest access with an end date
External designers, consultants and client representatives should be invited as guests with an expiry date set at invitation. Access reviews inside IT support for construction are not an annual event; they are a monthly one, because the appointment list changes monthly.
Conditional Access that survives a signal drop
Policies should be written so that a site manager with a weak signal can still authenticate. Require compliant devices and MFA, allow sensible session lifetimes, and test every policy from a cellular connection before it goes live. A policy that only works on the office Wi-Fi will be bypassed within a week.
Intune, shared devices and the tablet that walks
Site tablets get dropped, stolen and left in vans. Enrol them, encrypt them, and confirm you can wipe them remotely. Test the wipe once, on a real device, before you need it — the number of businesses that have the licence but have never proved the capability is remarkable.
Leavers on the day they leave
Construction leaver events are often verbal and same-day. The process needs to run from a single trigger — disable sign-in, revoke sessions, reclaim the licence, retain the mailbox — and it needs to be executable by a site manager’s phone call at 17:00 on a Friday.
Privileged access sits outside IT support for construction sites
Administrative accounts should never be used for day-to-day work, should be separate from normal accounts, and should be limited to a very small named list. This is standard practice everywhere and it is skipped in construction more often than in almost any other sector.
The Common Data Environment and Why a File Share Fails
Drawings and models are the operational heart of a project, and the part of IT support for construction that most directly touches build quality. How they are stored is a contractual matter, not a preference, and ISO 19650 already describes the shape.
The four states
ISO 19650 defines four states for information containers: work in progress, shared, published and archived. Work in progress belongs to the originating task team. Shared is issued for coordination and comment. Published is authorised for a defined use, including construction. Archived is a read-only historical record.
Status codes are metadata, not folders
A status code is metadata attached to a container that states its permitted use. Rebuilding that as a folder tree is the most common failure — folders cannot express permitted use, cannot travel with a file when it is emailed, and cannot be reported on.
What SharePoint can and cannot do
SharePoint handles versioning, permissions, retention and audit well, and it is already paid for in most Microsoft 365 plans. It does not natively handle model federation, clash workflows or the check-review-approve transitions. Many contractors run a dedicated environment for models and SharePoint for everything else, which is a defensible split provided the boundary is written down.
The revision that reached the pour
The failure mode is always the same. A drawing was superseded, the current file lived in a shared environment, but the version that reached the gang came from an email sent four days earlier. No amount of cybersecurity spend prevents that; a single system of record with enforced status codes does.
Make the CDE the only route drawings can travel
If drawings can reach site by email, they will. Blocking the alternative route matters more than choosing the perfect platform, and it is a policy and configuration decision rather than a procurement one.
Payment Notices, Adjudication and the IT That Carries Them
Construction payment runs on statutory deadlines, which quietly turns IT support for construction into a commercial function. Those deadlines are served by email and portals, which makes mail delivery a commercial control rather than a convenience.
The statutory clock
Under the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 as amended, a payment notice must be given not later than five days after the payment due date. Where the Scheme for Construction Contracts applies, the final date for payment is 17 days from the due date, and a pay less notice must be given no later than seven days before that final date.
Two five-day windows inside seventeen days
The notice deadlines fall on day 5 and day 10 of a 17-day cycle. That is 58.82% of the cycle spent under a notice obligation, with only five days between the two deadlines to assess, value and decide. Any system outage inside those windows lands directly on a commercial deadline.
What happens when a notice sits in quarantine
If the payer does not give a valid payment notice, the payee’s own application can become the notified sum. A notice that was written on time but delivered late, filtered into quarantine or sent to a departed employee’s mailbox has the same commercial effect as a notice that was never written.
Mail hygiene inside IT support for construction is a commercial control
That makes three ordinary IT tasks into commercial ones: making sure quarantine is reviewed daily by a named person, making sure leaver mailboxes forward rather than bounce, and making sure a shared commercial mailbox — not an individual — receives applications and notices.
Adjudication in 28 days
An adjudicator must reach a decision within 28 days of referral, extendable by up to 14 days with the consent of the referring party. That is a maximum of 42 days to assemble and present a complete project record, which is a retrieval test your document systems either pass or fail.
Suspension on seven days’ notice
Where a sum is not paid by the final date, the payee may suspend performance after giving at least seven days’ notice. Contractors dispute these events years later, so the evidence trail — dated notices, delivery receipts, retained mailboxes — has to outlive the project by a decade or more.
CIS, Payroll and the Records HMRC Expects
The Construction Industry Scheme turns subcontractor payment into a monthly compliance event with hard dates and automatic penalties. It is a records problem more than a tax one, which puts it inside IT support for construction rather than beside it.
The three deduction rates
Contractors deduct at 20% for a verified, registered subcontractor, 30% for one who is not registered or cannot be verified, and 0% where the subcontractor holds gross payment status. Deductions apply to the labour element, not to genuine materials.
The £25,000 that a lost verification costs
Take £250,000 of subcontractor labour paid in a month, modelled. At the verified rate of 20% the deduction is £50,000. At the unverified rate of 30% it is £75,000. The £25,000 difference is a cash-flow shock of 12.50% against the £200,000 the subcontractor expected to receive — caused by a verification record nobody could produce.
The 19th, and what follows it
Monthly returns cover the tax month running from the 6th to the 5th and must reach HMRC by the 19th of the following month. Missing the date brings an automatic £100 penalty, escalating for longer delays. A single failed integration between payroll and the accounts package can produce that penalty every month until somebody notices.
Verification records are an IT support for construction problem
Verification references, subcontractor status, payment and deduction statements and the returns themselves all have to be retrievable years later. Store them where retention is enforced rather than in a finance manager’s personal folder.
Integrations need monitoring, not hope
Where payroll, accounting and site time-recording talk to each other, the link needs an alert when it stops. Silent integration failure is the most common cause of a late CIS return in firms that otherwise run a tidy finance function.
Cyber Security and IT Support for Construction: What the Numbers Say
Construction is a target because it moves large sums between many parties on fixed dates, and IT support for construction is judged on how well it answers that. The national picture sets the baseline against which any provider’s proposal should be judged.
The national baseline IT support for construction works against
The Cyber Security Breaches Survey reports that 43% of UK businesses experienced a cyber security breach or attack in the last 12 months, with phishing the most prevalent type by far at 38%. Formal incident response plans were held by 25% of businesses, 47% reported some form of cyber insurance, and 5% held Cyber Essentials certification.
The two ratios worth remembering
Phishing at 38% is 88.37% of the 43% headline breach figure — very nearly every incident starts with a message. And with plans at 25% against a 43% breach rate, only 58.14% of the affected population had written down what to do. Both ratios are modelled from the published percentages.
The five controls that answer most of the risk
Cyber Essentials covers firewalls, secure configuration, user access control, malware protection and security update management. IT support for construction has to apply those five controls to cabins, gate systems and site cameras as well as to office laptops, and that scoping conversation is where most certifications stall.
Why site plant and cameras belong in scope
Anything with an IP address and a default password is in scope in practice whether or not it is in scope on paper. Site cameras, access terminals and remote plant telematics are internet-connected computers that happen to live in a compound.
Certification is a procurement asset, not an IT vanity project
Public sector construction work and an increasing share of tier-one supply chains ask for Cyber Essentials. Treating it as a bid requirement rather than an IT project usually gets it funded, and it forces the estate to be counted properly.
Invoice Fraud and the Subcontractor Payment Run
Payment fraud is the most expensive thing that happens to construction businesses through email, and it is the clearest test of whether IT support for construction is doing anything useful.
The scale of the problem
UK Finance reported authorised push payment fraud losses of £576.4 million and unauthorised payment fraud losses of £703.4 million for 2025 — £1,279.8 million between the two categories. Construction is exposed because payment runs are large, scheduled and involve many separate parties.
The construction-shaped version of the scam
The attacker watches a mailbox, learns the valuation cycle, and sends a bank detail change on the day the application is due — from a lookalike domain, referencing the correct project, the correct valuation number and the correct sum. It is convincing precisely because it is specific.
The control that actually works
Verification out of band, against a number held on file before the request arrived, performed by someone other than the person who received it. Everything else is secondary.
2. Finance calls the subcontractor on the number recorded at onboarding, never a number in the request.
3. A second authoriser confirms the call took place and records who was spoken to.
4. The first payment after any change is capped and confirmed as received.
5. All four steps are logged against the supplier record and retained.
The technical layer IT support for construction puts underneath
SPF, DKIM and DMARC on every sending domain, impersonation protection tuned for the finance team, external-sender banners, and alerting on new inbox forwarding rules. These stop the cheap attacks and make the expensive ones harder to stage.
Rehearse it once a quarter
Send your own finance team a simulated bank-change request. The result of that exercise tells you more about your exposure than any policy document.
Data Retention: Fifteen Years, Not Six
Retention design inside IT support for construction is different because the liability window is different, and most backup policies are quietly built for the wrong number.
The ordinary limitation periods
Under the Limitation Act 1980 the period for a simple contract claim is six years, and for a specialty — a contract executed as a deed — it is twelve years. Most construction contracts of any size are executed as deeds, so twelve is the working figure before anything else is considered.
What the Building Safety Act did to that
Section 135 of the Building Safety Act 2022 extended the limitation period for Defective Premises Act claims to 15 years for causes of action arising after 28 June 2022, and 30 years retrospectively for those arising before it. Fifteen years is 2.5 times the ordinary six-year contract period.
What a fifteen-year floor does to backup design
A 35-day backup rotation is an operational recovery tool, not a retention policy, and IT support for construction should never present it as one. Long-horizon records need a separate archive: immutable storage, a documented restore procedure, and a format that will still open when the people who created it have retired.
Immutability, not just copies
Ransomware deletes backups it can reach. Retention locks, separate credentials and an offline or immutable tier are the difference between a bad week and an unanswerable claim in 2039.
Test the restore, not the backup
A backup job that reports success proves the job ran. Restoring a full project record — drawings, correspondence, notices and payment history — proves you can answer an adjudication. Do the second one, annually, and keep the evidence.
What Good IT Support for Construction Costs in the UK
Pricing for IT support for construction varies with estate shape rather than headcount, which is why per-user comparisons between providers are so often misleading in this sector.
What belongs in the monthly IT support for construction fee
Service desk, monitoring and patching, endpoint protection, backup, identity administration and vendor management belong in the recurring fee. Anything that scales with projects rather than people should be priced separately and honestly.
Mobilisation and demobilisation are line items
A site build and teardown is real work: survey, router, firewall, printing, identity, and a clean removal at the end. Providers of IT support for construction who fold this into the per-user fee are either loading the fee or planning to skimp on the build. Ask for it as a fixed price per site.
| Cost line | Scales with | Buy it how | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Managed service desk | Users | Per user per month | Out-of-hours excluded |
| Microsoft 365 licences | Users, by role | Per user, split by plan | One plan for everyone |
| Site mobilisation | Sites | Fixed price per site | Hidden in the user fee |
| Site connectivity | Sites and duration | Per site per month | Long minimum terms |
| Backup and archive | Data volume and years | Per terabyte, per tier | Retention priced short |
| Security and certification | Scope of the estate | Project plus annual | Site systems out of scope |
The three questions that move the price most
How many sites will be live at once, how long does an average site run, and what proportion of the workforce needs full desktop capability. Those three answers change an IT support for construction quote more than headcount does, and a provider who does not ask them has not understood the business.
Cheap is usually a scope decision
When IT support for construction firms is quoted unusually cheaply, the saving is nearly always site mobilisation, out-of-hours cover or long-horizon retention. All three are visible in the contract if you look for them by name.
Choosing IT Support for Construction: A Buyer's Scorecard
Compare IT support for construction proposals with a weighted score rather than a feature list. Weightings should reflect the failure modes above, not the length of the supplier’s capability statement.
The IT support for construction scorecard
| Section | Weight | What a strong answer contains |
|---|---|---|
| Site mobilisation | 25 | Fixed price, named lead time, survey process, teardown |
| Connectivity and resilience | 20 | Per-site survey, failover, managed firewall, segmentation |
| Identity and device control | 20 | Named accounts, guest expiry, tested remote wipe |
| Records and retention | 15 | Immutable archive, 15-year horizon, annual restore test |
| Security certification | 10 | Cyber Essentials scope covering site systems |
| Commercial terms | 10 | Exit rights, data return format, notice periods |
The pass mark and the section that overrides the total
Score each IT support for construction section out of its weight and total to 100. A pass mark of 70 is realistic, with one condition: any section scoring below half its weight is a fail regardless of the total. A provider strong on service desk and weak on retention has not solved your problem.
Run it against three IT support for construction proposals
Score all three on the same day, from the same questions, using the written answers rather than the meeting. The differences will be obvious and they will rarely be about price.
Ask for two site references, not two board references
Ask to speak to a site manager, not a finance director. Site managers know within a week whether IT support for construction projects is real or theoretical, and they will tell you plainly.
Frequently Asked Questions About IT Support for Construction
Does a small contractor really need Microsoft 365 Business Premium?
Anyone handling contracts, payment applications, design data or personal data should have the security tier. For a genuinely light-touch role, a cheaper plan plus separately purchased security controls is defensible; a cheaper plan alone is not.
How quickly can a new site be brought online?
With a cellular-first design and a pre-staged router kit, a cabin can be productive in under a day. Fixed fibre needs to be ordered at the same time as the welfare units, which usually means weeks before anyone is on site.
Who is responsible for the golden thread, IT or the project team?
The duty sits with the client, principal designer, principal contractor and accountable person depending on the phase. IT support for construction provides the electronic facility, the security, the audit trail and the export capability that make those duties dischargeable.
Do site cameras and access control count as IT?
In practice yes. They are internet-connected devices holding personal data, and they belong in the asset register, the patching schedule and the certification scope even when operations bought them.
What retention period should a construction business use?
Fifteen years is a sensible floor for project records held under IT support for construction arrangements, given the Defective Premises Act position, with thirty years considered for anything relating to buildings completed before 28 June 2022. Take legal advice on your own contracts rather than adopting a number from an article.
Can we keep using WhatsApp for site coordination?
Informally it will happen regardless. The problem is that instructions and drawing revisions sent that way are not in the record and are not retrievable in a dispute. Give people a sanctioned mobile tool that is inside the IT support for construction scope, and enforce the boundary for anything contractual.
How do we handle subcontractors who need access to our systems?
Invite them as guests with an expiry date, restrict them to the specific project, review the list monthly, and remove access at the same moment their appointment ends rather than at the next audit.
References and Further Reading
Building Safety Act 2022, Section 135: Limitation Periods
Construction Leadership Council: Delivering the Golden Thread
Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996, Part II
Limitation Act 1980, Section 5
Limitation Act 1980, Section 8
Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015
DSIT Cyber Security Breaches Survey
NCSC Cyber Essentials Overview
HMRC: What You Must Do as a CIS Contractor
Business Population Estimates for the UK and Regions
Microsoft 365 Business Plans and UK Pricing
UK Finance Annual Fraud Report
ISO 19650-2: Information Management Using Building Information Modelling
HSE: Construction Design and Management Regulations Guidance
