Longueuil
IT services in Longueuil for SMBs and industrial suppliers
Longueuil runs on aerospace, transportation and manufacturing. Companies like these do not just have office IT, they have production IT: when the network stops, the shop floor stops with it. OKTO Solutions looks after those environments from Trois-Rivières, remotely first and with visits booked in advance. We have no premises in Longueuil, and we would rather say so plainly.
Longueuil sits about 140 km from the OKTO office in Trois-Rivières, roughly two hours by Highway 40 and the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine tunnel. For an industrial supplier the method is to instrument first and travel second: monitored servers, workstations and shop-floor links report their own failures. Visits are booked in advance, and no on-site response time is published.
Cabling and switches inside a production building are the part of the job that has to be done standing there.
Our method
Instrument first, travel second
Roughly 140 km separate our Trois-Rivières office from Longueuil, about a two hour drive along Highway 40 and through the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine tunnel. There is no OKTO office, no warehouse and no technician stationed in Longueuil, and you will not find a local address anywhere on this site. That single fact shapes how an industrial account gets set up. A properly monitored environment reports its own failures before an operator notices them, so the sensors go in before anything else. Most fixes then leave from our screens: a service that will not restart, a disk filling up, a link that has been flapping since the night shift.
When production stops, the sequence never changes. We take over remotely right away, isolate the cause, and restart the line if the fault is in software. If it is physical, we arrange the trip and tell you what time we will be there. We publish no on-site response time for Longueuil, because we have not measured one, and a number we made up would be worth nothing to you.
The local economy
Longueuil, the second aerospace cluster of Greater Montreal
The industrial census published by Développement économique de l’agglomération de Longueuil counts 78 aerospace companies on the territory, employing 7,629 people. Forty percent of Quebec’s small and mid-sized aerospace firms sit inside the agglomeration, and one worker in 25 there works in aeronautics.
Aerospace
Pratt and Whitney Canada and Héroux-Devtek anchor a supply chain of tier two and tier three shops, with the Canadian Space Agency and the École nationale d’aérotechnique on the same territory.
Food processing
Plants running long shifts, with production equipment, cold rooms and traceability systems that all depend on the same network staying up.
Transportation and logistics
Warehouses, fleets and dispatch systems, where a scanner that stops reading costs loading time immediately.
Information technology
Software and technical services firms whose own clients audit them, which raises the bar on access control and logging.
Life sciences
Laboratories and specialized manufacturers holding regulated data, with retention and traceability rules that outlive any single piece of equipment.
More than 11,000 businesses
That is the count across the five cities of the agglomeration. In May 2024 the Government of Quebec designated an aerospace innovation zone shared between Longueuil, Montreal and Mirabel, built around Saint-Hubert airport.
Source: Développement économique de l’agglomération de Longueuil, industrial census and territorial profile.
The shop floor
Why the office network and the shop network should not be the same one
A tier two supplier works on heavy design files, keeps powerful drafting workstations, and depends on a production management system that tolerates no downtime. Those two worlds do not carry the same traffic and do not fail the same way.
| Segment | What it carries | What breaks it | What we put in place |
|---|---|---|---|
| Offices | Email, accounting, quotes, guest wireless | Phishing, a compromised account, an unpatched workstation | Two-factor authentication, managed antivirus, patching, isolated guest network |
| Design | Drawings, heavy assemblies, licences tied to a workstation | A saturated link, a full disk, a file lost with no version history | Versioned storage, verified backups, sized network links |
| Production | The management system, shop terminals, label printers | An outage that stops the line rather than an inbox | Continuous monitoring, redundancy where it is worth paying for, a written restart procedure |
| Machines and controllers | Equipment wired to a machine, often on an old operating system | A patch the machine vendor never validated | A separate segment, filtered access, an inventory kept up to date |
Backing up drawings and keeping the two worlds apart stop being refinements and become survival issues. The detail sits on backup and disaster recovery, and the multi-site question on cloud and Azure.
Who does what
What travels over the network, and what needs someone in the building
The split is written down before the engagement starts, so nobody discovers it during an outage.
Handled remotely
- Continuous monitoring of servers, workstations and network links, including the ones on the shop floor
- Patching, antivirus, accounts and access rights
- File restores and backup verification
- Troubleshooting for office workstations and design stations
Needs a scheduled visit
- Cabling, wireless access points and switches inside a production building
- Installing or replacing a physical server
- Taking inventory of the equipment wired to your machines
- Annual planning meetings with management
Verifiable backups and audit trails are what a prime contractor actually asks to see.
Prime contractor requirements
We fill in the security questionnaire with you
A supplier who wants to keep its place in the chain has to answer for its IT, in writing, on a form written by someone else. That form arrives without warning and usually with a short deadline. We complete it with you and attach what is asked for.
- The description of our controls
- Our security policy
- Proof of our insurance
- The detail of our access rights and how they are logged
- The documentation of what is in place at your site, with the matching technical evidence
Around Longueuil
The other South Shore cities we serve
Longueuil forms an agglomeration together with four neighbouring cities. Staff live from one end of it to the other, and plenty of companies run a second address a few kilometres away.
Boucherville
Distribution and agri-foodOur IT services in Boucherville, built around an industrial park where warehousing and shipping set the pace.
Brossard
Offices, retail and clinicsOur IT services in Brossard, where the fabric is offices and stores rather than plants, with a great deal of hybrid work.
South Shore of Montreal
The regional overviewOur IT services on the South Shore of Montreal, for organizations spread across more than one municipality.
The full list of territories, with the distance from our office for each one, sits on the service areas page.
Questions and answers
Your questions about our services in Longueuil
Do you have an office in Longueuil?
How far are you from Longueuil?
Do you come on site to a plant in Longueuil?
What do you do if production stops because of an IT failure?
Do you work with aerospace suppliers?
Can you answer our prime contractor’s security questionnaire?
Can the shop network be separated from the office network?
Let us walk through your IT
A first conversation maps out your servers, your workstations, your backups and your weak points. No commitment, and a written answer at the end of it.