British Columbia
Managed IT Services in Vancouver
Head-office work, without the head-office overhead.
happier IT provides managed IT and cybersecurity to organizations in Vancouver : the professional practices, brokerages, small software teams and port-adjacent operators that make up most of the city's business base. Support is remote-first and comes from our own security operations centre in Canada (a SOC, the team that watches systems for suspicious activity). Metro Vancouver is where most of our British Columbia work sits.
How support works here
What we actually cover in Vancouver.
Nearly everything, remotely, and faster than a van could manage it. A person answers the phone. Laptops, updates, backups, accounts and monitoring are run centrally, whether your team is downtown, in Mount Pleasant or working from a kitchen table in North Vancouver.
Some work genuinely needs a person standing next to the equipment: a failed switch or firewall, cabling, an office move, twenty laptops swapped in an afternoon. Vancouver is about as easy as that gets in this province, 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.
We do not have a Vancouver office. happier IT has been named to the Business in Vancouver Top 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list, so the city is not new to us, but an award is not a storefront and we are not going to let it read like one.
Talk to a person
Service: 1 (888) 974-2779
Sales: 1 (888) 897-3611
The head office address is [3033 King George Blvd, Unit #36, Surrey, BC V4P 1B8]. There is no Vancouver branch address to list.
Most Vancouver conversations start with the same question: what do we still need somebody physically present for? That is worth twenty minutes on a call before anything is quoted.
Vancouver sectors we know
The Vancouver organizations we know best.
Vancouver concentrates small, expensive-to-run teams: professional practices with heavy confidentiality obligations, and cloud-native firms with almost no hardware at all. Both are unusual to support, in opposite directions.
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Professional services and brokerages
Downtown accounting, legal, insurance and advisory practices. Small headcounts, expensive practice software, and client files carrying real confidentiality obligations.
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Software, product and creative studios
Teams that run almost everything in someone else’s cloud and own barely any equipment. Identity, device management and backup are the whole job; there is no server room to visit.
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Port, marine and logistics
Operators working around the Port of Vancouver, Canada’s largest port. Office systems that have to talk to scheduling and customs paperwork that never stops moving.
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Construction head offices
The Vancouver office of a company whose actual work is on sites across the Lower Mainland. Two very different technology problems, one IT budget.
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Not-for-profits and associations
Lean teams, donor and member records, and a board that has started asking how any of it is protected. Often the first organization in a sector to be asked for evidence.
The rules that apply here
The privacy rules that apply in Vancouver.
Most Vancouver businesses fall under BC's own private-sector privacy law: PIPA, the Personal Information Protection Act. It applies instead of the federal legislation for organizations based here, and it sets out how personal information may be collected, used, kept and disposed of. A privacy officer, a written policy and a working knowledge of what you actually hold are the practical starting points.
Two exceptions come up constantly in this city. If you are a federally regulated business, a bank, an airline, a telecom, an interprovincial carrier, PIPEDA applies to you instead. PIPEDA is the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, the federal statute, and it applies to federally regulated organizations no matter which province they sit in.
And if you work for or alongside a public body, a health authority, the university, the city, a school district, FIPPA is in the room. FIPPA is the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, BC's public-sector law, and since 1 February 2023 public bodies have had to report privacy breaches to the commissioner and to affected people without delay, and to run a privacy management program. That flows downhill into what they will ask of you as a supplier.
None of this is alarming. It is a design input, like a building code. The expensive version is finding out after a platform already holds your records.
Where this bites first
Almost always in the same place: which cloud services are straightforward for you, and which are not. That decision is cheap before a migration and expensive after one.
More on the evidence side: compliance and risk management.
Questions
What Vancouver organizations ask us.
Do you have an office in Vancouver?
No. Our head office address is [3033 King George Blvd, Unit #36, Surrey, BC V4P 1B8], and Vancouver is served from there rather than from a local branch. happier IT has been named to the Business in Vancouver Top 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list, but that is an award, not a storefront, and we would rather say so plainly.
Can someone come on-site in Vancouver if we need them?
For the work that genuinely needs hands on equipment, yes, and Vancouver is the easiest part of British Columbia for that, being a short trip rather than a ferry or a flight. We attend in person across British Columbia and Alberta, and can reach sites beyond them. Ask before you sign, and hold us to the answer.
Which privacy law applies to a Vancouver business?
Usually BC’s PIPA, the Personal Information Protection Act, which is the province’s own private-sector privacy law. If you are federally regulated (a bank, an airline, a telecom, an interprovincial carrier) the federal PIPEDA applies instead. If you are a public body, or working closely with one, FIPPA, the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, comes into it as well.
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 somewhere else, we will name which ones and lay out the options rather than implying we control it.
We are fifteen people and mostly in the cloud. Is that too small?
No, and it is a common shape in Vancouver. A team with no server room still needs identity done properly, devices managed, backups that are tested rather than assumed, and somebody watching. That is a smaller job than a traditional network, and it is priced accordingly.
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.
Industries
Other British Columbia cities: Victoria Surrey Richmond 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.