IT department for your business

21 years! S3 was founded by Marc, Vince, and myself in June 2003 after we all graduated in computer engineering together. Our vision was to become an outsourced IT department for SMBs which is still what we are today. We were, therefore, a Managed Service Provider before the term was used.

We are still the three sole owners of S3 and work hard at it every day.

Our typical client is an SMB with a head office in the greater Montreal area. Many of our clients also have other offices throughout Canada and the US. A good proportion of them have hybrid office models and some work entirely from home.

Our clients take the security of their data and the productivity of their people very seriously. They want to ensure that their IT enables them to meet their business goals and does not hold them back.

Our clients are from different industries. 60% are professional service firms and the other 40% are in distribution or manufacturing.

Our clients are in the Microsoft ecosystem. They mostly use Windows, Office 365, Azure. The majority have a mix of cloud and on-premise infrastructure. The others have a purely cloud infrastructure.

Most clients have no full-time IT people. Some have an IT team that is mostly focused on their line of business applications.

Clients usually find us when they outgrow their IT provider, or they lose an internal resource and decide they do not want to manage IT people anymore.

Managed Services & Co-Managed Services.

As an MSP we become the IT department for SMBs that have no internal IT team or a small one. Our role is to ensure that the IT infrastructure supports the goals and vision of the business while not holding it back in any way. We focus on data security and employee productivity. These are our Managed Services.

Managed Services in a nutshell: The first thing we do is modernize, standardize, and secure the IT infrastructure. We then manage and monitor the infrastructure while our security team keeps it secure. We offer quick remote and onsite support to all the users. Finally, we build a 3-year IT plan with a detailed budget and risk analysis that we review annually.

Here is summary of the services we include:

• Modernize, standardize, and secure the IT infrastructure as well as the user experience
• Manage and monitor the on-premise or cloud IT infrastructure
• Manage and monitor cybersecurity
• Support users remotely or onsite
• Manage new user deployments
• IT strategy (3-year IT plan with budget and risk analysis)
• IT projects (analysis, execution, and project management)
• Hardware, software, and cloud services procurement

For SMBs with an IT team, our Co-Managed Services offer a collaborative extension to your team. We bring additional expertise in areas like strategic IT consulting, cybersecurity, 24×7 infrastructure management, user support, and project management and execution. This partnership allows us to bolster your IT capabilities, providing targeted support where it’s most needed and ensuring that your IT initiatives are both effective and aligned with your business strategies.