The technology
behind your technology.
Managed IT services, network infrastructure, cybersecurity, and cloud solutions — one team that keeps your systems fast, secure, and downtime-free so your team can focus on the work that matters.
Proactive. Not Reactive.
We fix problems before you notice them.
That's the whole point.
Most IT support is break-fix: something fails, you call, they come. We watch your systems continuously and resolve issues in the background — before your staff ever experience a slowdown or outage.
Downtime, breaches, and unmanaged IT are expensive
Most business owners don't see the true cost of reactive IT until it's too late. Here's what the numbers say.
What does one hour of downtime cost your business?
At $427 per minute, a single 2-hour outage costs a mid-size business over $51,000. Multiply that by the 3–5 incidents an unmanaged network averages per year, and the math makes managed IT the obvious investment. Our clients typically see IT-related downtime drop by 90% or more within the first 90 days.
From audit to fully managed
IT Audit & Infrastructure Review
We document your current hardware, software, network topology, and security posture. From that baseline we identify risks, inefficiencies, and gaps — and build a roadmap that fits your budget.
Implementation & Migration
Whether it's deploying new infrastructure, migrating workloads to the cloud, or hardening your network security — our technicians execute the plan with minimal disruption to your operations.
Ongoing Managed Support
We become your IT department. Proactive system monitoring, patch management, helpdesk for your staff, and an engineer on-call for anything that needs hands-on attention.
Everything in one IT plan
Managed IT Services
Proactive monitoring, patch management, asset tracking, and lifecycle planning — we keep your systems healthy before problems reach your staff.
Network Design & Infrastructure
Structured cabling, switching, wireless access points, VLANs, and firewall configuration — designed for performance, segmentation, and security from the ground up.
Cybersecurity & Endpoint Protection
EDR/XDR endpoint protection, email filtering, MFA enforcement, vulnerability scanning, and security awareness training — layered defence for modern threats.
Cloud Solutions & Migration
Microsoft 365, Azure, and hybrid cloud deployments — we handle licensing, migration, data integrity, and end-user onboarding so the cut-over is seamless.
Helpdesk & On-Site Support
Your staff call us, not you. Remote helpdesk resolves most issues in minutes; our technicians are on-site across Southern Ontario for anything that needs a physical presence.
Backup & Disaster Recovery
Automated encrypted backups to local and offsite targets, with tested recovery procedures — so a ransomware event or hardware failure doesn't become a business catastrophe.
Detailed Deliverables
Everything included in your managed IT engagement — no hidden fees, no surprises.
Proactive Monitoring & Patch Management
- 24/7 endpoint and server monitoring
- Automated OS and third-party patching
- Hardware health and lifecycle alerts
- Monthly performance and health reports
Helpdesk & On-Site Support
- Unlimited remote helpdesk tickets
- 1-hour critical issue response SLA
- On-site technician visits across Southern Ontario
- New employee onboarding and offboarding
Cybersecurity (EDR/XDR, MFA, Scanning)
- EDR/XDR endpoint protection on all devices
- Multi-factor authentication enforcement
- Quarterly vulnerability scans
- Security awareness training for staff
Cloud Solutions (M365, Azure, Hybrid)
- Microsoft 365 licensing and administration
- Azure and hybrid cloud management
- Cloud migration planning and execution
- Email security and spam filtering
Backup & Disaster Recovery
- Automated daily encrypted backups
- Local + offsite redundancy (3-2-1 strategy)
- Tested recovery procedures (quarterly)
- Ransomware recovery planning
Network Design & Infrastructure
- Structured cabling and rack management
- Managed switches, APs, and firewalls
- VLAN segmentation and QoS
- Wi-Fi surveys and optimization
Three situations bring people to a managed IT conversation.
Nobody shops for IT support when everything is working. Something has broken, someone has left, or a customer has started asking questions you can't answer on paper. Here's where most of ours start.
The business with an accidental IT person
- What brought you here
- One person — usually in operations or finance — became the person who resets passwords, orders laptops, knows the Wi-Fi key and holds the only admin login. They were never hired to do it, they're now doing it for a day a week, and they're about to take three weeks off.
- What you're actually worried about
- That the whole thing is sitting in one person's head and one person's browser, and that if they resign you'll be locked out of your own systems while trying to run the business.
The first thing we do is document what exists and get the credentials out of one head and into a controlled, recorded place that you own. Your accidental IT person usually stays — they just go back to their actual job and stop being the escalation point at 7pm.
The company leaving break-fix or an incumbent provider
- What brought you here
- Tickets are taking days, the same problems keep coming back, the invoices are unpredictable, or the provider that was right when you had nine staff isn't right now that you have forty. You've decided to move but you're dreading the actual switch.
- What you're actually worried about
- The transition, not the destination. Being stuck between two providers, neither of whom owns the problem, while your staff can't print and nobody can find the domain admin password.
We run the transition as a defined project with dates, not a vague onboarding. Discovery and documentation first, credentials verified while the incumbent is still in place, backups proven before anything changes, and a clean handover date. We'll also tell you where your current provider is doing a decent job and shouldn't be replaced.
The operator with a compliance or client-questionnaire driver
- What brought you here
- A customer, an insurer or a prospective partner has sent you a security questionnaire, or your sector has tightened what it expects of suppliers. It asks about multi-factor authentication, patching, backup testing, offboarding, access reviews and incident response — and you don't have written answers.
- What you're actually worried about
- Losing a contract, or a renewal, over paperwork you could have had in place. Or worse, answering optimistically and being held to it after an incident.
We work through the questionnaire item by item, tell you which answers are already true, which need work, and which are honestly out of scope for a business your size — then put the evidence behind the ones we fix. What you get back is answers you can defend, not answers that sound good.
What switching IT providers actually looks like
This is the part that stops most businesses from moving, and it's the part almost nobody describes honestly. Here's our real sequence, including what we need from you.
Discovery and documentation
We inventory every workstation, server, switch, firewall, access point and printer; map your network and internet links; list every cloud tenant, domain registrar, licence subscription and line-of-business application; and record who owns what. The output is a written document of your environment that you keep regardless of what you decide next.
Decide who can authorise access to each system, and tell us what nobody else knows — the application that only runs on the one old PC, the login shared by the warehouse, the server nobody is allowed to reboot. Discovery finds most of it, but the awkward things usually come from a person.
Credential handover and ownership check
We collect and verify administrative credentials for every system and confirm, in writing, that the accounts are registered to your business and not to your outgoing provider. Domain names, the Microsoft or Google tenant, the firewall, the backup platform and any licensing portal all get checked. Everything lands in a password platform that belongs to you.
Give us a named person with authority to request the handover from your incumbent, and be prepared for the uncomfortable conversation if something turns out to be registered in their name. This is the single most common problem we find, and it is far easier to fix while you are still a paying client of theirs.
Agent rollout and security baseline
We deploy monitoring and management agents to every endpoint and server, bring patching under one schedule, stand up endpoint protection, enforce multi-factor authentication on email and remote access, and clean up stale accounts from people who left years ago.
Approve the change window for multi-factor enforcement and tell your staff it's coming. This is the one step end users notice, and a short heads-up from you lands far better than a surprise prompt from us.
Backup verification and a tested restore
We check what is actually being backed up, what is silently not, and how far back recovery really goes — then we perform a real restore of a file and, where there's a server, a system-level recovery test. Until that test passes, you do not have backups; you have a scheduled task.
Tell us which data would genuinely stop the business if it were gone tomorrow, and how long you could survive without it. That answer drives backup design more than storage cost does.
Offboarding the incumbent
On an agreed date we take support ownership: helpdesk contact details go out to your staff, we remove the previous provider's remote access tools and administrative accounts, rotate every credential they held, and confirm no orphaned access remains. We keep a documented list of exactly what was revoked.
Serve notice to your existing provider yourself, in line with your contract, and tell us the last day of their coverage. We'd rather overlap than leave a gap — most poor transitions are the result of a notice period that expired before anyone checked what it covered.
First monthly review
We sit down with the ticket history, patch compliance, backup results, security findings and asset ages, and give you a plain-language picture of where the risk and the spend are. Out of it comes a short roadmap of what should be replaced or improved and roughly when.
Send whoever controls the budget, not just whoever fields the complaints. The roadmap is only useful if the person who can approve a server replacement has heard why it's on the list.
Have this ready and the job goes faster
- A current staff list, including people who have left in the last year and still have accounts
- Your existing IT contract — specifically the notice period and what happens to your data on exit
- Where your domain names are registered and who receives the renewal emails
- A list of business-critical applications and the vendor contact for each
- Any client security questionnaire, insurance question set or audit finding you're working against
- Names of the one or two internal people who already field IT questions informally
- An honest note on kit you know is past its life — the old server, the laptops still on unsupported software
Why managed IT quotes vary so widely
Managed IT is usually priced monthly per user or per device, but that headline figure hides most of the real variables. These are the things we're actually looking at when we build a number for you.
How many people and how many devices
Per-user pricing suits an office where everyone has a laptop and a phone. Per-device suits shift work, shared terminals and warehouses where forty staff use eight machines. Counting it the wrong way is how businesses end up overpaying, so we'll ask how people actually work before choosing which model to quote.
Servers and cloud footprint
A fully cloud-based business with no server on site is simpler to support than one running domain controllers, a line-of-business database and a virtualisation host in a closet. Hybrid — some on site, some in the cloud — is the most common and sits in between. Each server, tenant and hosted workload carries its own patching, backup and monitoring load.
How much legacy kit you're carrying
Unsupported operating systems, switches past end of support and applications that only run on one specific old machine all raise both risk and effort — they break more, they can't be patched, and they constrain everything around them. This is one of the few areas where spending capital once lowers your monthly cost afterwards, and we'll show you the arithmetic rather than just recommending replacement.
Sites and on-site response expectations
Remote support covers the majority of tickets. What changes the price is how fast you need a person physically in the building, at how many buildings, and whether that includes evenings or weekends. A single Mississauga office wanting next-business-day attendance and a four-site operation wanting same-day everywhere are different services.
How deep the security tooling goes
A baseline of patching, endpoint protection, multi-factor authentication and tested backup covers most small businesses. Above that sits email filtering, managed detection and response, log retention, vulnerability scanning and staff phishing training — each genuinely useful, each a cost. Where you sit is usually decided by what your clients and insurer ask of you, and we'd rather match that than sell the full stack by default.
Project work sitting outside the monthly fee
A monthly agreement covers running what exists. Migrations, office moves, new server deployments, cabling and major upgrades are quoted as projects. We say so plainly at the start, because 'is that included' is the question that sours more managed IT relationships than any other.
We quote after discovery, not from a headcount over the phone, and the monthly figure is fixed for the term with project work quoted separately and approved before it starts. If discovery shows that what you really need is a one-off cleanup and a sensible backup rather than a monthly agreement, we'll quote that instead and leave the door open.
Answered before you have to ask
“What am I signing up for, and how do I get out?”
A defined term with a written notice period, and we'll put both in front of you before you commit rather than in an appendix afterwards. What matters more than the length is the exit: your documentation, your credentials and your data are yours throughout, and on exit we hand over the environment document and the password vault contents and cooperate with whoever replaces us. We've been on the receiving end of a hostile handover and we won't run one.
“What happens to the person who currently does our IT?”
In most cases they keep their job and get it back. The accidental IT person returns to the role you actually hired them for, with us as escalation. Where there's a genuine internal IT employee, we're usually there to take the repetitive load — patching, monitoring, after-hours, helpdesk overflow — so they can do project work instead. We'll say clearly which of those two situations we think you're in after discovery.
“Who ends up holding domain-admin credentials?”
You do, and so do we. Administrative credentials live in a password platform that belongs to your business, with named access and a record of who used what. We don't hold accounts you can't see, and we don't register your domain names, tenants or licences in our own name — a practice that is common enough that you should ask every provider you speak to. Every technician of ours uses their own named account, so the audit trail says a person, not 'admin'.
“What does 'unlimited helpdesk' actually exclude?”
It covers supporting what's in the agreement: your users, their devices, your email and cloud tenant, your network gear. It does not cover buying you new hardware, projects and migrations, third-party application development, supporting personal devices that aren't on the agreement, or work on kit that's beyond support and can't be fixed. Anyone offering genuinely unlimited everything for a flat fee is either excluding those things in the fine print or is about to be unhappy — we prefer to list them up front.
“Your SLA says one hour. Is that when it's fixed?”
No, and any provider promising a fixed resolution time for every issue is promising something they can't control. A response time is when a technician has the ticket, has contacted you and has started work. Resolution depends on the fault — a password reset is minutes, a failed drive waits on a part, and a vendor's own outage isn't ours to fix. What we do commit to is a response window by severity, an owner on every ticket, and telling you where it stands rather than letting you chase it.
“Are we too small for this?”
You might be, and we'd rather say so now. Below roughly ten staff, with everything in the cloud and no server, a full monthly agreement often costs more than it returns — you're generally better served by a one-time cleanup, multi-factor authentication turned on properly, a backup that's been tested, and us on call hourly when something breaks. We do that work happily. Managed IT starts earning its money when the count of people and devices is high enough that things break weekly and nobody in the building has the time to own it.
How it stacks up
In-house IT is expensive, limited in scope, and offline when you need it most.
| Feature | RiowellManaged IT | Vs.In-House IT | Vs.No IT Support |
|---|---|---|---|
| Avg. ticket resolution | < 4 hours | Varies | Never |
| Proactive monitoring | 24/7 automated | Business hours | None |
| Cybersecurity coverage | Layered & current | Often outdated | None |
| Scalability | On-demand | Headcount limited | N/A |
| Cost predictability | Fixed monthly | Variable | N/A |
| On-site coverage | All Southern Ontario | Single location | N/A |
Any business that runs on technology
From 5-person professional services firms to 200-employee manufacturers — if your business depends on computers, networks, and cloud systems, we can manage it. We specialise in businesses too large for ad hoc IT and too small to justify full-time staff.
“We were running on an aging server with no proper backups and a consumer router anyone could crack. Riowell audited us in a day, had us migrated to Microsoft 365 and a proper firewall within a week, and now I get a monthly report showing everything is healthy. Night and day difference.”
Stop managing IT yourself.
Let us handle it.
Book a free IT assessment. We'll review your current setup, identify your biggest risks, and give you a clear proposal — with transparent fixed-monthly pricing, no surprise invoices.
We help you meet the standards your industry demands
PIPEDA Compliance
Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act requires every business handling personal data to safeguard it. We implement end-to-end encryption, role-based access controls, data retention policies, and breach notification procedures that keep you audit-ready.
- Encryption at rest and in transit
- Access control and audit logging
- Data retention and disposal policies
- Breach notification procedures
PHIPA (Healthcare)
Ontario practices answer to PHIPA, not to the American HIPAA rules most vendors quote. We set up encrypted storage and transmission, per-person access logging on record systems, and tested offsite backup, then document what was configured so your privacy lead has something to hand a college or a patient who asks. What your specific obligations are, we confirm with them rather than assert.
- Encrypted storage and transmission of patient records
- Per-person access logging, not shared logins
- Secure offsite backup with tested recovery
- Written configuration record for your privacy lead
PCI-DSS (Retail/Financial)
If you process, store, or transmit cardholder data, PCI-DSS compliance is non-negotiable. We handle network segmentation, vulnerability management, firewall hardening, and the twelve technical control requirements — reducing your audit scope and liability.
- Network segmentation and firewall rules
- Quarterly vulnerability scans (ASV)
- Cardholder data environment isolation
- Change management and access review
Not sure which compliance frameworks apply to your business? We'll identify your obligations during your free IT assessment and build a roadmap to close any gaps.
Book a Compliance ReviewManaged IT support in your city
On-site response time is the part of managed IT that is genuinely local. Pick your city to see our coverage commitment and the industries we already support there.
Frequently Asked Questions
Real numbers from a real client
“Since switching to managed IT, our downtime dropped from 12 hours a month to less than one. We saved $8,000 in the first year just by eliminating break-fix costs — and our staff stopped losing half a day every time something went wrong.”— IT services client, 35-person accounting firm, Mississauga
Results are representative of actual client outcomes. Individual results vary based on infrastructure complexity and starting conditions.
Ready to secure
your business?
Book a free on-site assessment. We'll evaluate your property and design a custom security and IT solution — no pressure, no commitment.