Trois-Rivières, serving all of Quebec 450 231-3836 info@oktosolutions.ca
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Our own region

IT services in the Mauricie, from Louiseville to La Tuque

The Mauricie is not one more territory on a map for OKTO Solutions. It is the region the company is based in. The office sits at 994 boulevard du Saint-Maurice in Trois-Rivières, and every trip in the region starts there.

Talk to the local team Law 25 compliance

OKTO Solutions covers the Mauricie from its Trois-Rivières office: Bécancour 23 km away, Louiseville 36 km, Shawinigan 41 km, Saint-Tite 65 km and La Tuque 166 km. Municipalities, regional county municipalities, public bodies and small businesses get a local team for cybersecurity, off-site backup and Law 25 compliance.

What is measured

How long does it take to get to you in the Mauricie?

The region is stretched out. Between the farmland of Maskinongé in the south and the forests of La Tuque, there is more than two hours of driving. Any provider promising the same thing everywhere on this territory is telling stories. Here are the real road distances, measured from the office address.

AreaDistance from the officeOn-site visit
Trois-Rivières, Cap-de-la-Madeleine, Pointe-du-LacA few minutesSame day when an outage stops a team
Bécancour23 kmSame day or next day
Louiseville and Maskinongé36 kmWithin the day depending on urgency
Shawinigan and Grand-Mère41 kmWithin the day or the next
Saint-Tite and Sainte-Anne-de-la-Péradeabout 65 kmPlanned, work bundled together
La Tuque and the Haut-Saint-Maurice166 kmPlanned ahead, a full day on site
Equipment leaves ready. A workstation headed for La Tuque is built at the Trois-Rivières office: system patched, disk encrypted, joined to your directory. All that is left is plugging it in. That is what keeps a two-hour drive from being spent installing Windows.

Compliance

What does Law 25 ask of a municipality or a public body?

The Mauricie has a great many small administrations: municipalities, regional county municipalities, housing bureaus, community organizations, cooperatives. All of them handle personal information belonging to citizens, employees and suppliers, and all of them fall under the law whatever their size. The problem is almost never bad will. It is that an organization of six people has nobody whose job this is, while the obligations stay exactly the same as anywhere else.

The work comes down to three concrete things, and none of them takes a big budget. You have to designate and publish a privacy officer. You have to keep a register of confidentiality incidents, including the ones that had no consequence. And you have to write down what you keep, where, for how long and who can see it. The rest (encryption, two-factor authentication, handling departures) consists of technical measures we put in place and document.

Off-site copies are encrypted, kept in Canada, and their restore is tested.

In a small municipality the incident register is often a simple shared spreadsheet, as long as it is kept current and someone is named to fill it in. What blocks people most often is not the tool: it is knowing whether an email sent to the wrong recipient belongs in it. The answer is yes, and that is the kind of case we settle with you during setup.

Law 25 obligations Virtual CIO module

A designated officer

A name, a title and published contact details. In a small organization that is often the executive director, backed by us on the technical side.

An incident register

Every confidentiality incident is logged, with its date, its nature and the assessment of the risk of serious injury, even when no report is required.

Retention rules

What you keep, where, for how long and who may consult it. It is the question most often left hanging, and the simplest one to settle.

The scenario that hurts

What happens in the first six hours after ransomware

An organization around here that gets encrypted on a Monday morning does not need a lecture on cybersecurity. It needs an order of operations. Here is ours, in the order we follow it.

  1. Contain. Isolate the affected devices from the network, cut the compromised access, close the active sessions. Nothing else happens first.
  2. Preserve the evidence. The logs are what tell you how it got in. Wiping them out of reflex throws away the only useful information there is.
  3. Measure the spread. Which servers, which shares, which mailboxes, and above all whether the backups were reached.
  4. Restore from a clean copy, starting with what puts the organization back to work, not with what is biggest.
  5. Assess the risk of serious injury for the people concerned, which decides whether the Commission d’accès à l’information has to be notified.
  6. Log the incident in the register and close the doors that were used, otherwise the same attack comes back within weeks.
The off-site copy is the only thing that really counts that day. A backup plugged into the same network as the server gets encrypted along with it. The backup and disaster recovery page explains how the copies are kept apart, and managed cybersecurity describes the detection that comes before.

The territory

The Mauricie, six territories with little in common

The region had 289,722 residents in 2025, or 3.20% of Quebec’s population, according to the ministère de l’Économie, de l’Innovation et de l’Énergie. It gained close to 6,000 people in a year, its strongest population growth since 1987. It is made up of the Trois-Rivières and Shawinigan agglomerations and the regional county municipalities of Maskinongé, des Chenaux, Mékinac and La Tuque.

  • Farms and agri-food businesses in Maskinongé and des Chenaux
  • Digital and manufacturing SMBs in Shawinigan and Grand-Mère
  • Sawmills and forestry businesses in Mékinac and La Tuque
  • Municipalities, regional county municipalities and community organizations
  • Clinics, pharmacies and seniors' residences
  • Retailers and service businesses along Routes 138 and 155

Shawinigan built its reinvention on digital work and energy. The Digihub, founded in 2014, is recognized as Quebec’s third digital hub. The south of the region stays agricultural, the north lives on forestry and tourism, and between them the urban centres lean more and more on innovative small businesses rather than on the big factories of the past.

Sources: Ville de Shawinigan and Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions

Our office is in Trois-Rivières, in the middle of the region. To the east, OKTO serves Quebec City, 129 km away. The detail of what is included sits on our plans, and the day-to-day for users on IT support.

Questions and answers

Common questions about the Mauricie

How far into the region do you go?
All the way to La Tuque, 166 km from the office. Past Shawinigan, visits are planned ahead and the work is bundled so that a trip serves several purposes rather than one.
We are in Louiseville. Is that too far?
No. Louiseville sits 36 km from the Trois-Rivières office, about thirty minutes by Route 138 or Highway 40. That is inside the close radius, where a visit can happen the same day.
Does our municipality have to comply with Law 25?
Yes. Quebec’s Law 25 applies to public bodies as well as private companies, and a municipality handles personal information belonging to citizens, employees and suppliers. You need a designated and published privacy officer, a register of confidentiality incidents, and written retention rules.
What do we do if we suffer a data breach on a Friday night?
The first hour is for containment: cut the compromised access, isolate the affected devices, preserve the evidence. Then comes the assessment of the risk of serious injury, which determines whether the incident has to be reported to the Commission d’accès à l’information and to the people concerned. The incident register gets filled in either way, even when no report is required.
Our budget is tight. Does this still work?
Yes. We start by looking at what is already in place and by removing what is being paid for nothing: duplicate licences, backups nobody uses, devices still invoiced but long out of service. The budget gets discussed before the work, never after.
Our Internet is unreliable in our area. Is that a problem?
It is a design constraint, not a roadblock. Backups run outside peak hours, recovery works from a local copy rather than downloading everything back from the cloud, and workstations keep their working files available offline.
Do you work with forestry and farm businesses?
Yes. Those settings come with concrete constraints: an office on a back road with poor Internet, equipment living in dust, seasonal staff to open and close every year. We work with that instead of applying an urban office template.

Let us draw up a picture of your IT

Tell us where you are in the region and what is snagging right now. We answer with a picture of your IT equipment and the priorities in order. Call 450 231-3836, Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

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