IT services and cybersecurity for London, Ontario organizations

Health care, insurance, education and industry

London is the largest city in Southwestern Ontario and a regional centre for health care and education. Its hospitals and research institutes, Western University and Fanshawe College draw a large network of clinics, labs, allied health practices and research groups. Insurance and financial services have a long history in the city and employ many people. Manufacturers, food processors and logistics companies sit along the Highway 401 and 402 corridors, and a steady base of law firms, accountants, agencies and technology companies serves them all.

What ties these organizations together is information that must be protected and systems that must stay up. The problems we see most often:

• Personal health and financial information in too many places. Records spread across EMRs, shared drives, email attachments and personal devices, with broad access and few audit trails.
• Insurers asking harder questions. Cyber insurance renewals and carrier agreements now ask about multi-factor authentication, endpoint protection, backups and incident plans, and a wrong answer can void cover.
• Ransomware risk in health and manufacturing. Both are frequent targets because downtime is expensive and pressure to pay is high.
• Reporting that takes days. Managers pull numbers from several systems into spreadsheets, so decisions rely on last month's data.
• Accounting software that has been outgrown. Growing firms run into the limits of entry-level accounting tools when they add locations, inventory or project billing.

What we do for organizations in London

Managed IT services give you one accountable team for help desk, devices, servers, cloud services and vendor coordination, with the help desk open around the clock for managed-service clients.

Our cybersecurity work is built around what attackers and insurers focus on: identity, endpoints, email and recovery. That means multi-factor authentication everywhere, endpoint detection and response, filtered email, patching, staff training and backups that are tested. Privacy and compliance readiness helps health and financial clients document safeguards and breach procedures, and prepare for audits and questionnaires.

Microsoft 365 is configured with sensible sharing rules, data loss prevention and sensitivity labels so staff can collaborate without leaking information. For management teams tired of spreadsheet reporting, data analytics brings figures from your systems into dashboards that update themselves.

Manufacturers, distributors and multi-location practices that have outgrown their accounting package can move to Prometheus ERP, customized to cover purchasing, inventory, production, projects and finance in one system.

How support works in London

Your staff raise requests with the help desk by phone, email or portal, and most issues are resolved remotely, often while they watch. Monitoring, patching, security alerts and cloud administration run in the background without anyone visiting. Managed-service clients have access to the help desk at any hour, with response targets for each priority level set in the service agreement.

For work that needs a person present, such as installing a firewall, wiring a new suite or setting up equipment in a clinic, we arrange on-site visits as needed. Your agreement records how those visits are scheduled and what they cost, so budgeting is straightforward.

Getting ready for a cyber insurance renewal

Renewal questionnaires have become one of the main reasons London firms call us. The questions are fairly consistent: is multi-factor authentication on for email, remote access and administrator accounts; do you run endpoint detection and response; are backups kept offline or immutable, and tested; do staff get phishing training; is there a written incident response plan. We go through the questionnaire with you before it is submitted, close the gaps that can be closed in time, and give you evidence for each answer. An honest answer backed by real controls is worth far more than a confident one that fails when you make a claim.

Privacy, compliance and local considerations

• Health information. Ontario's PHIPA governs health information custodians and the agents and electronic service providers who handle information for them, including safeguards, logging and breach notification.
• Private-sector privacy. Insurance brokers, law firms, manufacturers and other businesses are generally covered by PIPEDA, with mandatory breach reporting and record keeping.
• Financial services. Firms serving federally regulated institutions may see requirements that flow from OSFI guidance on technology, cyber and third-party risk written into their contracts.
• Education and research. Research projects often carry data-handling conditions from funders or ethics boards; your IT setup should make those conditions practical to follow.
• Accessibility. Ontario organizations with public-facing websites may have obligations under the AODA.

This is general information, not legal advice.