IT support in Pickering for suppliers who get audited
If you supply into the energy or engineering chain here, the toughest security review you face is not from a regulator. It is from your biggest customer's procurement department, and it arrives as a spreadsheet.
At a glance
- On site in Pickering and across Durham Region
- Mon–Fri 8am–5pm, after hours by arrangement
- One number to call, no vendor hand-offs
- Quoted per site. We will tell you what you do not need.
What Pickering is, in the parts that affect this work
Pickering's employment lands are unusually stratified. Brock Industrial Park runs to 869 hectares of energy, environmental, engineering and logistics work with Ontario Power Generation as the largest employer. Whites Road Prestige Business Park is 21 hectares zoned for offices with no outdoor storage. The Innovation Corridor north of Seaton is 324 hectares of new prestige employment land anchored by Kubota Canada and FGF Brands.
This page is about what that means for it support specifically. For how the work itself runs, what is included and what it costs to scope, the Managed IT Services page is the one to read.
The questionnaire is the real deadline
Firms in and around Brock Industrial Park supply organisations with genuine regulatory obligations, and those obligations flow downhill as vendor security assessments. Multi-factor authentication everywhere. Evidence that patches are applied and how quickly. A documented backup with a stated recovery time. A named incident response contact. A list of who holds administrative access and when it was last reviewed.
None of that is unreasonable and most of it you should have regardless. The problem is timing: the questionnaire usually appears with a contract renewal attached, and the controls it asks about take weeks to implement and then need a history behind them to be evidenced.
Which is the argument for doing it before you are asked. We would rather get a client's basics in place in a quiet quarter than assemble evidence under a renewal deadline, and the quiet version costs less.
What we will and will not sign
We will implement the controls, document them, produce the evidence, and sit on a call with your customer's security team and answer their questions directly. That is usually all anyone actually wants.
We will not certify you against a standard, sign an attestation on your behalf, or describe ourselves as your auditor. Those are separate roles for a reason, and an IT provider that audits its own work is not providing assurance to anybody. If your customer requires formal certification, we will tell you so and prepare you for the firm that does it.
The office parks and the industrial park need different things
A professional services tenant on Whites Road, next to a Rogers call centre and a distributor, has an office IT problem: mailboxes, files, laptops, phones, and the fact that all of it is now somebody else's cloud service and none of it is backed up by default.
A fabricator or engineering firm in Brock Industrial Park has that plus a shop floor: machines with controllers running an operating system nobody will ever patch, a licence dongle that must not move, a supplier who wants remote access into a machine, drawings that are the actual value of the business.
That second set is where a generic managed IT plan quietly fails, because the correct answer for an unpatchable machine controller is not to patch it. It is to isolate it so it cannot be reached from anywhere it does not need to be reachable from. We start at the wall, so segmenting the network is work we can actually do rather than a recommendation we hand you.
Getting to you in Pickering
Pickering is inside our regional travel band: one flat charge per site visit, disclosed on the quote. West Pickering is the far end of our service area, so we will be straight with you about whether a same-afternoon response is realistic or whether you want somebody closer for break-fix.
We are a service-area business based in Oshawa with no storefront, so every job happens at your premises. If your site sits at the edge of what we cover, we would rather say so on the phone than find out on the day.
Want this scoped for your site in Pickering?
Tell us the building and what you are trying to achieve. We will tell you what it takes, and whether you actually need it.
Before you call
Can you help us answer a customer's security questionnaire?
Yes, and it is one of the more useful things we do. We go through it with you, answer honestly where you already comply, and give you a costed list of what is needed for the rest. We will not help you answer yes to something that is not true, because the questionnaire is usually attached to a contract and a false answer there is your liability.
We have machines running Windows 7 that the vendor will not update. Now what?
You keep them and you fence them in. An unpatchable controller on an isolated network segment with no internet route and no path to your file server is a manageable risk. The same machine on the same flat network as everything else is the thing that ends up in an incident report. Replacing working machinery over an operating system is almost never the right call.
Do you support the drawing and engineering software?
We support the workstations, the licensing infrastructure, the storage and the backups, which is where the problems usually are. The applications themselves are the vendor's and we coordinate rather than pretend. What we will do is make sure the file history is real, because a corrupted drawing restored from last night is a much better day than a corrupted drawing.