Questions and answers
FAQ on IT services for SMBs in Trois-Rivières
FAQ on IT services for SMBs in Trois-Rivières. Learn how OKTO Solutions supports SMBs with Microsoft 365, cybersecurity and IT support. The answers are grouped by theme and read fine on their own, even if you do not know the rest of the site.
OKTO Solutions manages IT for small and mid-sized businesses across Quebec: monitoring of workstations and servers, user support, cybersecurity, tested backups, Microsoft 365 and custom software. The service is billed per workstation or per server, monthly, in three plans. The office is in Trois-Rivières and the service covers all of Quebec.
Questions and answers Theme 1
Getting started and agreements
The questions people ask before signing anything: who we are, how the first meeting goes, what happens in the first three months and how far the service area reaches.
Who is OKTO Solutions?
OKTO Solutions is a managed IT services company with its office in Trois-Rivières, in the Mauricie. It was founded in 2025 by a team that carries more than 15 years of combined experience and has supported over 100 organizations. It acts as a full IT department for small and mid-sized businesses across Quebec, or as reinforcement for a team already in place.
How does the first meeting go?
It runs about twenty minutes and it costs nothing. You get asked how many workstations and servers you have, what is wasting your time right now and what has already been put in place. Your environment is then reviewed in more detail, and you receive a written quote. No commitment at that stage. The method is set out in how a quote is put together.
How does onboarding a new client work?
Over 90 days, split into three phases. Weeks 1 to 3: discovery and start-up, inventory of the device fleet, the licences and the access, and correction of the urgent problems that turn up. Weeks 3 to 8: rollout of monitoring, endpoint protection and backups. Weeks 8 to 12: strategic review, where the real state of your environment and the order of priorities get presented.
Can we hand over only part of our IT?
Yes. Plenty of companies keep one person in house and hand us the monitoring, the security and the backups. Others give us user support and keep their internal projects. That is the principle behind co-managed IT: the agreement spells out what stays with you and what comes to us, and it adjusts when your needs change.
Which regions of Quebec do you serve?
The office is in Trois-Rivières and the service is offered everywhere in Quebec. The work is done remotely, with planned trips to Greater Montreal, the Mauricie and the Quebec City area when a mandate calls for it. There is no office in Montreal or on the South Shore, and we do not pretend otherwise.
Theme 2
Day-to-day support
What happens on a Tuesday morning when a printer refuses to answer, a file has vanished or a server will not come back up.
How do we ask for support?
By phone, by email or through the client portal. Every request creates a ticket in our system, with the person handling it and a note on what was done. You do not have to repeat your story on each call: the history of your environment is there, including the work done months earlier.
How fast do you answer a request?
Regular support runs Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time. Requests are prioritized by impact: a production server that is down goes ahead of a formatting question. The Complet plan adds response times guaranteed by a service level agreement, written into the contract in plain words.
Do you outsource your support?
No. Requests are handled by our own team, here in Quebec. You talk to people who have access to the documentation of your environment and who know what was done the last time. No external call centre, no anonymous first line that makes you reboot the machine before transferring you somewhere else.
Do you come on site?
Yes, when the work calls for it. A server to replace, a network run to pull, a workstation that will not boot: that gets settled on site. The rest, which is the vast majority of requests, is handled remotely and faster. Trips outside the Mauricie are planned ahead, which lets several jobs be grouped into the same visit.
Do you offer 24/7 emergency service?
Yes, with the Complet plan. An emergency channel stays available at all times for critical outages, with response times guaranteed by a service level agreement. On the Base and Standard plans, monitoring still runs 24 hours a day and critical alerts are recorded, but a human picks them up during business hours.
Theme 3
Security
The questions that come up after a company down the road has its servers encrypted. Nobody enjoys finding that out on a Monday morning.
How do you protect an SMB against cyberattacks?
In layers, because no single protection holds on its own. Endpoint and server protection with an EDR agent, multifactor authentication on accounts, mail and DNS filtering, patches applied without delay, verified backups and continuous monitoring. On top of that comes security awareness training, because most incidents start with a click. The detail is on the page about cybersecurity for SMBs.
What should we do in a ransomware attack?
Call before touching anything. The affected machines get isolated from the network, the scope gets measured, the way in gets tracked down, then everything is restored from a clean, tested backup. Only afterwards does the hardening of whatever gave way begin. This is exactly the scenario that makes verified backups non-negotiable.
Do you help with Quebec’s Law 25 compliance?
Yes. Your current posture gets assessed, the expected technical controls get put in place, meaning access management, encryption, logging and an incident response plan, and the whole thing gets documented. The person responsible for the protection of personal information at your company keeps the legal responsibility, but is no longer alone with the subject. See Law 25 for Quebec SMBs.
Do you run phishing simulations?
Yes, four times a year with the virtual CIO (vCIO) module. Realistic fake emails go out to your teams, then the people who clicked get a short, targeted training session. The point is not to trap anyone, it is to bring the click rate down from one simulation to the next. That is measurable and it shows up in the reports.
Can you help us qualify for cyber insurance?
Yes. Insurers now demand specific controls before they issue a policy: multifactor authentication, EDR protection on workstations, off-site backups, a documented recovery plan. Those pieces get put in place and the documentation the questionnaire asks for gets provided. Filling out a questionnaire blind is the surest way to see a claim denied.
Your question is not here
The questions that are not on this page get answered too
One SMB out of two shows up with a question that fits no box: accounting software that stopped working after a Windows update, an employee who left with their access still active, a supplier asking for proof of compliance before renewing a contract. Write or call, the answer costs nothing.
Regular support runs Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time.
Theme 4
Backup and cloud
The most misunderstood subject in a Quebec SMB, and the one that gets expensive when you drop it.
Does Microsoft back up our Microsoft 365 data?
No, not in the sense people mean. Microsoft guarantees the availability of its service, not the recovery of your content. A deleted file, a mailbox emptied by an employee on the way out or a SharePoint folder encrypted by ransomware all go beyond the recycle bin and the default retention. A separate backup of email, files and Teams is still needed. See backup and disaster recovery.
How often are backups tested?
Twice a year from the Standard plan up, with a real restore and the result written into the report. A backup job showing green proves nothing: it says the job finished, not that the data can be recovered. The only proof worth anything is a successful restore that has been documented.
Where is our data hosted?
In Canada by default. Microsoft 365 in the Canadian tenant, with data at rest in Canada. Azure resources in the Canada Central or Canada East regions. Backups stay in Canada as well. An exception gets documented in writing before it is applied, never after the fact, because it is a criterion that keeps coming back in compliance reviews.
Can we move our physical server to the cloud?
Often yes, but not always. A file server and a mail system move well. A homegrown application that needs very low latency or a hardware dongle is sometimes better left on site. The analysis looks at the real cost over three years, the bandwidth available and what becomes of the recovery plan. We say no when a migration brings no advantage. See cloud and Azure.
Theme 5
Billing and commitment
What it costs, how it gets counted, and what happens the day you want to leave.
How much do your managed IT services cost?
The amount depends on how many workstations and servers have to be covered and on the plan chosen among Base, Standard and Complet. That is why no price is posted on the site: two companies with fifteen employees do not have the same device fleet. After a short call and a look at your environment, you receive a written amount, not a range. What each level includes is set out on the page about our plans.
Is billing per user or per workstation?
Per managed workstation or server, never per user. Someone who works on a laptop and on a desktop therefore counts as two units, and two employees who share the same workstation count as one. The number of machines is what drives the real monitoring, patching and maintenance work, so that is what gets counted.
Do we have to sign a long-term commitment?
No. The monthly plan, the block of prepaid hours and the one-off intervention exist side by side, and all three get explained before you choose. When there is a commitment period, it is written in the agreement, in plain words, not buried in an appendix. Silent automatic renewal is not how we work.
Can we buy hours without taking a plan?
Yes. A one-off intervention is billed by the hour for an isolated or urgent need, with no commitment. For recurring use, prepaid blocks of 10, 20 or 50 hours give access to the same expertise with service priority and a more predictable cost. Past five planned hours, the block is almost always the better deal.
What happens if we end the agreement?
You leave with the full documentation of your environment and your administrative access. That documentation belongs to you and it has never been held back as a bargaining chip. The transition to the next provider is planned so that no service is interrupted, and the team answers the newcomer’s questions during the handover.
Theme 6
Artificial intelligence and development
The lesser known side of the offer: custom applications, integrations between systems that were never meant to talk, and automating the tasks that eat hours every week.
What kinds of applications do you develop?
Web, mobile and internal applications: client portals, dashboards, management tools and integrations between systems that do not talk to each other, such as an ERP, a CRM and Microsoft 365. The starting point is almost always the same: a team retyping data by hand from one system into another. See custom software development.
How can artificial intelligence actually help an SMB?
By taking away data entry and manual searching. Pulling the numbers out of an invoice that arrived by email, finding information buried in years of documents, answering the questions clients ask most often, turning a call into a follow-up note. The gains get measured in hours per week, not in promises. It always starts with one precise, measurable case.
Is our data safe with your artificial intelligence solutions?
Yes, and it is the first question settled before any technology gets chosen. Depending on how sensitive the data is, the processing happens in your own Microsoft tenant, in infrastructure hosted in Canada, or on a model installed on your premises. Access is controlled and logged, and your data is never used to train a public model.
Can you modernize an existing application?
Yes, and it is often wiser than rebuilding everything. What still works, what is holding things back and what carries a security risk get analyzed, then the replacement happens piece by piece. An aging database, an interface that is impossible to use on a phone or a dependency that is no longer maintained get handled one at a time, without stopping operations.
Going further
The subjects covered in depth elsewhere on the site
Each page below takes one of the themes in this FAQ and develops it fully, with concrete cases and comparison tables.
Managed IT services
Everything that gets monitored, maintained and corrected in an SMB device fleet, workstation by workstation.
Cybersecurity for SMBs
EDR, MDR, continuous detection and incident response, explained without the jargon.
Law 25 compliance
What a Quebec SMB owes, the incident register and the deadlines that come with it.
Backup and recovery
What Microsoft 365 does not back up, and what a tested recovery plan actually looks like.
Our plans
Base, Standard and Complet, line by line, with the vCIO module and the blocks of prepaid hours.
Why OKTO
What sets our model apart from a remote-only provider or an in-house technician.
One more question, no formal appointment needed
A twenty-minute call is often enough to untangle a situation. You get an honest answer, even when the answer is that you need nothing right now.