IT Success Story | District of Logan Lake

CASE STUDY

How a Wildfire Sparked the District of Logan Lake’s IT Transformation

With IX Solutions as a managed services partner, the municipality rebuilt its digital foundation for long-term resilience.

When you run a municipality, you learn to live with a wide mental load—infrastructure, operations, public safety, budgets, emergencies, and the small surprises that come with managing a community. For Wade Archambault, Chief Administrative Officer for the District of Logan Lake, technology used to sit squarely on that list of persistent worries. Without an in-house IT team, there was no central accountability for keeping critical systems stable, secure, and available. And for a long time, those systems made the job harder than it needed to be.

The Daily IT Challenges Behind the Bigger Shift

For years, Logan Lake’s IT environment operated in a familiar pattern: a small third-party contractor working on a break-fix model and a collection of aging on-premise systems that functioned adequately under normal conditions. But “adequate” often meant slow, unreliable, or unnecessarily time-consuming. Routine tasks—like accessing shared drives or uploading municipal documents—could take far longer than they should. At one point, Wade recalls upload speeds so slow, he would need to start a file transfer, leave to handle other responsibilities, and hope the file was finished by the time he returned.

Accessing internal drives through the VPN was equally challenging. Day-to-day productivity was often shaped by the limitations of the system, not the needs of the work. For Wade, who already carried a long list of responsibilities at work, these IT issues became yet another “open tab” in his mental workload.

But it wasn’t until the 2021 wildfire that the broader implications of these challenges became clear.

The Wildfire That Highlighted a Need for Change

When the community was evacuated, Wade relocated to the District’s Emergency Operations Centre (EOC), which had been intentionally hardened with backup generators and resilient internet. From there, he supported emergency communications via email while monitoring the situation. When the power went out, the EOC transitioned smoothly to generator power, exactly as planned.

But as Wade continued coordinating with regional partners, his email suddenly went offline. He quickly realized the cause: the District’s email server was still located at Municipal Hall, a building without backup generation. He drove to Municipal Hall himself to retrieve the physical server and bring it back to the EOC so communications could continue. Losing critical access to communication during an active emergency underscored a vulnerability he could no longer ignore.

With the nearby town of Lytton having recently lost critical records in their own wildfire, the implications were clear. The District needed a more resilient IT foundation that could withstand unexpected disruptions and support continuous operations.

“The 2021 wildfire really highlighted where our risks were,” Wade recalls. “It showed us that we needed systems we could rely on, regardless of the situation.”

Soon after, Wade was appointed CAO, and modernizing IT became one of his first priorities. But as he started pushing for changes—moving email to the cloud, improving resilience, updating infrastructure—he realized him and his staff were effectively steering the transformation themselves. And without internal IT experts, progress was slow.

“I remember thinking, ‘this shouldn’t fall on my shoulders, I’m not an IT professional,’” he says. “We needed a partner who could define the long-term vision and guide us toward it.”

That recognition led Logan Lake to conduct an IT assessment, issue a formal RFP, and ultimately select IX Solutions as their managed services partner—the team equipped to help the District build the secure, modern, and dependable environment they needed moving forward.

Reactive to Resilient IT Environment

First, the foundations. IX began by licensing the District properly for Microsoft 365, updating every workstation and server, and rebuilding the environment around proactive management rather than reactive fixes. They implemented modern security controls like Microsoft Defender, MFA, and Conditional Access, and introduced governance and compliance measures that had never existed in a formalized way.

For the first time, Logan Lake had a secure foundation supported by device management, automated patching, cloud storage, backup, and an ecosystem of tools designed to make work easier rather than harder.

IX now manages the District’s IT environment through:

Microsoft 365 software license management
Microsoft Defender management
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) enforcement
Conditional Access support
Compliance management
Desktop patching and updates
Per-user cloud storage
Cloud printer management
Cloud security scanning

This shift has fundamentally changed how Wade and his colleagues work. Remote access is now dependable. Staff can collaborate without waiting for systems to catch up. Critical infrastructure feels stable rather than fragile. And perhaps most importantly, the weight of IT—the mental tab Wade carried for years—is finally closed.

“I still have plenty of things that keep me up at night,” he says with a laugh. “But IT isn’t one of them anymore. That’s a big change.”

He now finds himself talking to neighbouring communities about the value of managed services, especially those still relying on break-fix providers or ageing systems that place more burden on municipal leaders than they realise.

“There are municipalities where IT is still the thing that keeps them up at night,” he says. “If you want to sleep better, find a partner you trust. For us, that’s IX.”

Secure Remote Access

Reliable Support Partner

Stable Systems

A Municipality Equipped for What Comes Next

The District of Logan Lake recognised that their digital foundation needed to evolve, and they invested in building stability, security, and resilience for the long term.

Today, the municipality operates with confidence that their critical IT systems are well taken care of. Wade leads with fewer unknowns, fewer IT headaches, and one critical area of responsibility lifted from his shoulders—all supported by a managed IT partner who keeps their systems dependable when it matters most.