British Columbia
Managed IT Services in Richmond
Airport-side operations, on time.
happier IT provides managed IT and cybersecurity to organizations in Richmond, British Columbia: the freight forwarders, customs brokers, food processors and distributors clustered around Vancouver International Airport and the Fraser River terminals. Support is remote-first, from our own security operations centre in Canada, and built around systems that are not allowed to stop.
How support works here
What we actually cover in Richmond.
Everything that can be done without standing in the room, which in a logistics business is nearly all of it and needs to happen quickly. A person answers. Devices, updates, accounts, backups and monitoring run centrally. A SOC, a security operations centre, the team watching for suspicious activity, is looking at your systems from Canada.
Richmond work has one characteristic that shapes the design more than sector does: the office system usually has to talk to something else. A scheduling platform, a customs filing system, a warehouse management system, a scale, a scanner fleet. When those stop, paperwork stops, and paperwork stopping is what actually costs money. So the first job is usually understanding which of those connections are load-bearing before touching any of them.
Physical work in Richmond is a short trip rather than a ferry or a flight. What we can commit to, and how quickly: we attend in person across British Columbia and Alberta, and can reach sites beyond them. There is no Richmond office; the head office address is [3033 King George Blvd, Unit #36, Surrey, BC V4P 1B8].
Before any migration
Service: 1 (888) 974-2779
Sales: 1 (888) 897-3611
We map the integrations first, what talks to what, and what breaks if it stops. In a freight or food business that map is the project, and skipping it is how a weekend cutover becomes a Monday incident.
Richmond sectors we know
The Richmond organizations we know best.
Richmond holds the airport, a working river port and a large share of the region’s food handling. Almost everything here moves, and almost everything that moves generates paperwork with a deadline.
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Freight forwarding and customs brokerage
Air and ocean forwarders, brokers and 3PLs whose filing systems answer to somebody else’s clock. Uptime is not a preference here; a missed window is a real cost.
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Food processing and seafood
Processors, packers and cold-storage operators. Traceability records, production systems on the floor, and an office network that must not take either down.
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Importers, distributors and wholesale
Companies running inventory, order and shipping systems that were integrated years ago by somebody who has since left. Documenting that is usually job one.
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Light manufacturing and assembly
Production equipment with its own controller, its own vendor and its own opinion about updates, sitting on a network that also carries email.
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Professional and back-office services
Accounting, insurance and advisory practices serving the trade economy, often working across time zones and languages, with client files that carry real obligations.
The rules that apply here
Which privacy law applies to you in Richmond.
In Richmond this question has a genuinely different answer depending on what you do, and getting it wrong wastes a lot of effort. Most BC businesses fall under PIPA, the Personal Information Protection Act. British Columbia's own private-sector privacy law, which applies instead of the federal legislation.
But federally regulated businesses fall under PIPEDA instead, wherever they are based. PIPEDA is the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, the federal statute. Federally regulated means airlines and air transport, interprovincial and international trucking and shipping, banks, and telecoms, which describes a meaningful share of the companies operating around this airport. If your business crosses a provincial or national border in the course of its work, PIPEDA is very likely your law.
The practical difference is not enormous, but the reporting duties and the commissioner you answer to are not the same, and a policy written against the wrong statute is worse than no policy because it looks finished. It is a ten-minute conversation and it is worth having before anyone writes one.
If you also handle food, you already keep traceability records for reasons that have nothing to do with privacy law. Those records are still records, they need to be backed up, restorable and reachable when somebody asks.
Two laws, one design
Whichever applies, the underlying work is the same: know what you hold, limit who can reach it, log access, and be able to say what happened. The statute changes the paperwork, not the engineering.
Questions
What Richmond organizations ask us.
Do you have an office in Richmond?
No. Our head office address is [3033 King George Blvd, Unit #36, Surrey, BC V4P 1B8], and Richmond is served from there rather than from a local branch. Physical attendance in Richmond is a short trip rather than a ferry, and we attend in person there, as we do across the rest of British Columbia and Alberta.
We are an air cargo business. Does BC privacy law apply to us, or the federal one?
Almost certainly the federal one. Air transport is a federally regulated industry, so PIPEDA, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, applies rather than BC’s PIPA, the provincial private-sector law. The same is true for interprovincial trucking and shipping, banks and telecoms. It is worth confirming before anyone writes a privacy policy against the wrong statute.
Our warehouse system talks to three other systems. Can you take that over?
Yes, and the first step is mapping it rather than changing it. We document what talks to what, which connections are load-bearing, and who owns each vendor relationship. Only then does anything move. In a freight or food business, that map is the project.
Can you support production equipment on the floor?
We support the network it sits on, the systems that talk to it, and the separation between that equipment and everything else. The equipment itself usually stays with its vendor, and we work alongside them rather than pretending otherwise. Where the line falls is something we agree in writing before starting.
Is our data kept in Canada?
For the systems we run, yes. Our security operations centre, the team watching for suspicious activity, is in Canada and staffed by our own employees. Where a third-party platform you already use stores data elsewhere, we will name it and lay out the options rather than implying we control it.
Related
Where to go next.
Industries
Other British Columbia cities: Vancouver Victoria Surrey Kelowna All of British Columbia
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.