Where we work
Managed IT services in British Columbia
A dense coast, a wide interior, one standard of support.
happier IT provides managed IT and cybersecurity to organizations across British Columbia, with most clients in Metro Vancouver and others in Victoria, Nanaimo and Kelowna. Support is remote-first, which matters more here than almost anywhere, geography in this province is a real constraint, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
How support works here
Remote first, because the map says so.
Almost every IT problem is solved faster remotely than by waiting for a van. A person answers, takes control of the machine if that helps, and finishes the thing while you are still on the call.
Then there is the work that genuinely needs hands on equipment: a dead switch, an office move, a hardware refresh, a new site. In the Lower Mainland that is a short trip. On Vancouver Island it is a ferry. In the Okanagan or the Kootenays it is a flight or most of a day in a car.
So we plan around it instead of ignoring it. Spare parts held where they will be needed, replacement devices shipped ready to use, several jobs batched into one visit. Where on-site attendance is available, and how quickly: minutes, not hours.
We publish that rather than claiming province-wide same-day attendance. A promise that cannot survive a ferry schedule is not worth making.
Talk to a person
Service: 1 (888) 974-2779
Sales: 1 (888) 897-3611
Head office: 3033 King George Blvd, Unit #36, Surrey, BC V4P 1B8
happier IT has been named to the Business in Vancouver Top 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list.
BC sectors we know
What the work looks like in this province.
British Columbia's mix is its own. More cloud-native small firms, more marine and port work, more seasonal operations, and a lot of organizations sitting on land that is not near a data centre.
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Construction and trades
Lower Mainland general contractors, electrical and mechanical firms running Procore or Jobber, with trailers and rented offices that appear and disappear on the same site over eighteen months.
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Professional services and brokerages
Downtown Vancouver accounting, legal and insurance practices. Small headcounts, expensive practice software, and client files that carry real confidentiality obligations.
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Marine, port and logistics
Operators around the Port of Vancouver and the Fraser River terminals, where the office system has to talk to scheduling and customs paperwork that never stops moving.
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Wineries and agriculture
Okanagan producers with a tasting room, a retail point-of-sale system, a packing line and a farm office, four different technology problems on one property.
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Software and creative firms
Small product and studio teams who run almost everything in the cloud and need identity, backup and device management done properly rather than a rack of servers.
Privacy law here is different
PIPA, FIPPA, and where your data actually lives.
British Columbia has its own private-sector privacy law: PIPA, the Personal Information Protection Act. For most BC businesses it applies instead of the federal legislation, and it sets out how personal information may be collected, used and kept.
Public bodies are a separate matter. Universities, health authorities, municipalities and many organizations funded by them fall under FIPPA, the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, which brings expectations about where personal information is stored and who can reach it.
The practical effect is simple. Some cloud services are straightforward for you and some are not, and it is far cheaper to know which is which before a migration than after one. Our security operations centre is in Canada and staffed by our own employees, which removes one common question early.
None of this is a reason for alarm. It is a design input, the same way a building code is.
If you answer to a board or a funder
Bring us in while the question is still "which option should we choose", not after a platform is already holding your records. Undoing a residency decision is the expensive version.
More on the evidence side of this: compliance and risk management.
Cities
Where our BC clients are.
Vancouver. The largest share of our BC work. Downtown professional services, brokerages and small software firms, plus head offices for companies whose actual operations are somewhere else entirely.
Surrey, Burnaby and Richmond. Where the trades, the warehousing and the light industrial work sit. Multi-site is the norm here: a yard, an office and a project trailer, each with different connectivity and none of them next to each other.
Victoria and Nanaimo. Professional practices, not-for-profits and organizations that work alongside public bodies, which is where FIPPA questions tend to surface. Remote support does the daily work; anything physical is planned rather than dispatched.
Kelowna and the Okanagan. Wineries, agriculture, construction and professional services, often with a retail counter attached. Point-of-sale, farm office and seasonal staff turnover make identity and access the recurring problem rather than hardware.
Each city page above says what the work actually looks like there: the sectors, which privacy law applies to you, and how far away a person is. Where two cities have the same story, the pages say the same thing rather than inventing a difference.
Questions
What BC organizations ask us.
Do you have an office in Vancouver?
Our head office address is 3033 King George Blvd, Unit #36, Surrey, BC V4P 1B8. We serve British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario. happier IT was named to the Business in Vancouver Top 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list, so the province is not new to us, but we would rather publish where technicians actually attend than let an award imply a storefront.
Which BC cities do you cover?
Remote support covers the province. Most of our BC work sits in Vancouver, Surrey, Burnaby and Richmond, with clients in Victoria, Nanaimo and Kelowna. Ask about your town, the honest answer is usually "yes remotely, and here is exactly what on-site looks like".
How does support work if we are on Vancouver Island or in the Interior?
The same way it works everywhere else, except that a person driving to you is a ferry or a flight rather than twenty minutes. Remote support does not care about that. Physical work does, so we plan it: spare hardware kept on site, replacements couriered, visits batched instead of one trip per task. Outside the Lower Mainland we still attend in person, and we agree the window with you when the job is raised.
Does BC have its own privacy law we need to worry about?
Yes. British Columbia has PIPA, the Personal Information Protection Act, its own private-sector privacy law, which applies to most BC businesses instead of the federal one. Public bodies, universities, health authorities and many organizations funded by them fall under FIPPA, the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, which comes with expectations about where personal information is stored. If either applies to you, tell us before we design anything, because it changes which cloud services are on the table.
Is our data kept in Canada?
For the systems we run, yes, our security operations centre (SOC, the team that watches for suspicious activity) is in Canada and staffed by our own employees. Where a third-party platform you already use stores data somewhere else, we will name which ones and lay out the options, rather than implying we control it.
How fast do you respond?
Our response-time target is minutes, not hours. We would rather publish a number you can hold us to than describe ourselves as fast.
Related
Where to go next.
Want to know what this would look like for you?
A 30-minute call. No slides, no audit fee, no obligation. We ask what is breaking and tell you honestly whether we are the right fit.