Cybersecurity Services in Newmarket, Ontario

Cybersecurity protects your systems, data, and team from ransomware, phishing, and unauthorized access. Newmarket makes a good case for why one plan for everyone doesn’t work. The town’s population reached 87,942 in the 2021 census, up 4.4% from 84,224 in 2016, at about 2,284 people per square kilometre, according to Statistics Canada’s 2021 Census Profile for Newmarket. Packed into that space is an unusually wide mix of employers, and each one answers to different customers, insurers, and rules.

Southlake Health anchors a health sciences ecosystem of more than 3,000 employees, according to the Town of Newmarket, and the York Region Administrative Centre sits on Yonge Street. Manufacturers run plants here too, including Celestica’s Newmarket operation and Mars Canada’s Newmarket chocolate facility. Then there’s the historic lower Main Street, a heritage conservation district under Part V of the Ontario Heritage Act, lined with small, owner-operated retailers and professional offices that usually have no IT department at all.

Those businesses don’t need the same security plan. A practice handling patient records has to show who accessed what, and when. A supplier to a manufacturer may have to answer a customer’s security questionnaire before a contract renews. A Main Street storefront mostly needs its accounts protected and its backups to actually restore. When a generic package misses the mark, the cost is concrete, whether that’s days of downtime, a purchase order that stalls, or a privacy breach a health practice may have to report to the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario.

ACT360 protects a Newmarket business in 6 layers, which are identity, endpoint, email, network, backup and recovery, and people and process. Each layer covers a different way attackers get in, so one weak layer doesn’t leave the whole business exposed.

Backup testing follows the same thinking. ACT360’s published disaster recovery testing approach calls for quarterly component tests of critical systems, a full recovery simulation every year or after any significant change, and tabletop exercises at least twice a year. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security’s ransomware guidance makes the same point, that tested backups kept offline are what make recovery quick.

Two terms shape every recovery plan we write. The recovery point objective (RPO) is how much recent data you could afford to lose, for example the last hour or the last day. The recovery time objective (RTO) is how long a system can be down before it seriously hurts the business. We set both with you, system by system, instead of promising one recovery time for every company.

In ACT360’s experience, a cybersecurity assessment takes a few days to about a week, followed by a written report and walkthrough. Remediation and implementation timing is set after that, because it depends on what the assessment finds and how large your environment is.

We don’t quote a standard implementation timeline, because these 5 things move it more than anything else.

• How many users, devices, and locations you have. A single office on Microsoft 365 moves faster than 3 sites with an on-site server.
• How many high-priority findings there are. A handful of quick fixes is a different job from a backup or firewall replacement.
• Older systems and line-of-business apps. Software nobody has documented takes longer to secure without breaking it.
• How much documentation you need. A practice with patient records, or a supplier facing a customer questionnaire, needs more written evidence than a small retail shop.
• Access to admin accounts and vendors. If nobody knows who holds the firewall or backup passwords, finding out becomes the first task.

Once controls are in, monitoring runs continuously, your security posture is reviewed every quarter, and ACT360 recommends a full reassessment at least once a year. You can read more about what a cybersecurity assessment actually covers.