Calgary · Mountain Time

Cloud, security, helpdesk.
Still working Tuesday.

Migrations, patching, the VPN nobody trusts. Calgary and Western Canada teams usually find us after “good enough” stopped being good. You get a number that rings a desk here, not a portal lottery.

Grab 30 minutes What we actually do

You know who is on the account

Paging if you bought paging

Can drive to your office

AWS / Azure / GCP

Engineering dashboard and cloud monitoring

Typical P1 ack

<15 min

when 24/7 coverage is in your agreement

Backups last night

Verified OK

Tools we patch, break, and fix in prod

AWS

AZURE

GOOGLE CLOUD

KUBERNETES

DATADOG

TERRAFORM

CLOUDFLARE

What we sell

Honest IT scope. One invoice for our time.

Typical week: half-finished Intune tenant, file share limping on a VM, SaaS nobody audited, firewall firmware three releases behind. We untangle it, write it down, then keep the lights on.

Cloud & migrations

Seen enough lift-and-shift weekends to know where the bodies are buried. Cutovers land after hours when we can help it.

Cutover war stories

Security & hardening

MFA that sticks, logs you can grep, tabletop before the auditor lands. SOC 2-shaped work when you need the paperwork to match reality.

Security, non-magic edition

Managed IT & helpdesk

Imaging laptops, onboarding hires, printers that hate everyone. SLAs spell out when a human answers, not “priority 3.”

Ticket reality

Automation & AI support

Script the boring onboarding steps first. Copilots where they shave real minutes off finance or support. No “AI transformation” deck required.

Automation we have shipped

DevOps & release hygiene

Pipelines, Terraform modules, staging that is not fiction. Goal is boring deploys. Friday heroics cost extra and nobody wants them.

Release hygiene

Backup & recovery

Backups nobody is afraid to restore. Drills on the calendar, not “someday.” Runbooks live in the repo, not in Greg’s head. Greg goes on vacation too.

Restore drills

Apps & integrations

Internal tools, customer portals, the ugly CSV-to-ERP bridge. We pick stacks your next hire can grep without crying.

When build makes sense

Monitoring & on-call

Dashboards your team opens on purpose. Paging rules tuned so disk-at-92% does not wake five people. Postmortems plain enough for legal.

On-call setup

Retention, not slogans

We are not the cheapest ticket. We are the one you keep.

Alberta clinics, builders, logistics, small software shops. They stick around because someone owns the awkward middle: between “we should really fix that” and shipped.

90+

Active orgs (approx.)

99.9%

Uptime targets we report on

<15 min

P1 ack (contracted coverage)

10 yrs

Operating from Calgary

Discovery calls skip the BDR script. Engineers show up early.
Calgary-area site visits when a rack or wiring needs eyes.
Statements split labour, cloud usage, licences. No mystery blob.
Canadian regions default. Anything offshore is written down on purpose.

Northcloud engineers collaborating in Calgary

Helpdesk queue (business hours)

Median first reply: ~22 min last quarter

Stack

Vendor logos are cheap. Keeping them patched is not.

Same tools we run for clients: Terraform state in git, Datadog paid for with real money, licences tracked in a spreadsheet nobody loves but everyone uses.

AWS

Microsoft Azure

Google Cloud

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

Ansible

Datadog

Cloudflare

PostgreSQL

Redis

GitHub Actions

How we work

Paper trail beats vibes. You see the next step.

Diagrams, access lists, rollback notes live in your repo or ours. If the fit is wrong we say it in week one, not month four.

Kickoff & inventory

Passwords, dependencies, the thing that kills revenue if it blinks. Calls first, on-site when the closet smells like burnt PDU.

Plan & pricing

Written proposal: phases, owners, weekly check-ins, definition of done. Cloud dollars split out from our hours so finance can reconcile.

Build & cutover

Night-of schedule posted in Slack before anyone orders pizza. Smoke tests, rollback, someone owns comms to the business.

Operate & tune

Patching, capacity, cost nags, the fixes too small for a project ticket. Steering monthly or quarterly, your call.

Recent work

Three snapshots. Names changed where we had to.

Figures came from the engagements they describe; rounding happens.

Longer write-ups

Medical clinic reduced VPN and EMR outages

Healthcare · Calgary

−62%

after-hours pages

Clinic group stabilized VPN and EMR access

Split tunneling fixed, MFA people did not fight, circuit monitoring so we stopped blaming the office Wi-Fi.

VPN + EMR notes

Alberta retailer moved inventory and POS to Azure

Retail · Western Canada

3 wk

store cutover window

Eight stores, one Azure landing zone

Inventory off a tired VM, geo-redundant blob backups, finance stayed on the old ERP connector on purpose.

Store rollout log

Logistics · API

4×

peak headroom

Dispatch API stopped falling over at month-end

Autoscaled on queue depth, noisy neighbour boxed out, load test on staging that was not a laptop.

Sketch + metrics

Clients

After the shiny kickoff wears off.

“AWS bill was basically random each month. They tagged the mess, set budgets, now finance stops asking me what a ‘data transfer’ line is. Small win, loud relief.”

Renée Okonkwo

Director of Ops, Bow River Parts Ltd.

“Three IT people in three years. Northcloud picked up a half-done Intune job and actually closed it. New hires stopped getting laptops that ‘work tomorrow.’”

Jordan Meyers

COO, Fieldstone Environmental

“Vendor breach next door; we stayed clean. They sat with legal, did the boring restore test after. Same time zone mattered. No waiting on a handoff deck from overseas.”

Sandra Li

CFO, Chinook Cold Storage Co-op

Pricing

Retainers for our hours. Pass-throughs stay obvious.

Cloud invoices ride through without markup. If scope drifts, we redraw the agreement instead of eating hours in silence.

Core IT

Helpdesk, patching, printers that behave when they feel like it. Roughly twenty-five seats before we need to talk tier.

$1249 /mo

Ask about Core IT

Up to ~25 managed endpoints
Business-hours helpdesk (Mountain Time)
Patch reporting & basic monitoring
Monthly health summary email
Backup monitoring (client-owned tools OK)

Most common

Cloud + security

Endpoints plus a block of cloud engineer time each month. For teams already paying Azure and still nervous about prod.

$2916 /mo

Talk scope for Cloud + security

Up to ~100 endpoints
Extended hours + optional 24/7 paging add-on
Monthly cloud engineering hours included
SIEM/log review aligned to your risk profile
Quarterly steering (roadmap, spend, risks)
Annual restore test included

Embedded team

Fractional platform lead, ugly compliance timelines, multi-region. SOW plus retainer; nothing heroic billed as “included.”

Custom

Describe the mess

Dedicated weekly hours & backlog ownership
Custom SLAs and escalation trees
Regulated or multi-tenant environments
Automation / internal tooling builds
Hybrid on-prem + cloud retained expertise
vCIO-style planning when you want it

FAQ

FAQ without the sales varnish.

Tiny footprint: a few weeks plus a cutover window. ERP plus twenty years of AD glue? Longer. We give a week-by-week plan after inventory instead of guessing on minute one of the call.

Blog

Postmortems, migrations, stuff we filed wrong once.

Open blog

Cloud 8 min read

File server to Azure without ruining someone’s Friday

Security 6 min read

SOC 2 evidence auditors keep asking us to resend

Ops 10 min read

Copilots that paid off vs. ones we rolled back

Intro call, zero deck

Messy stack? Fine. We will say if it is us or not.

VPN flaps, surprise invoices, patch debt. If it is outside what we do well, we will nudge you somewhere else. No ghosting.

Grab 30 minutes hello@northcloud.ca

~90 orgs under support agreements (ballpark) ~10 yrs Calgary SOC 2-style when the RFP demands it

Cloud, security, helpdesk.Still working Tuesday.