Straight answers, including the awkward ones.

No. There is no offshore call centre. In business hours you reach our own team. After hours, or if every technician is already on a call, the line overflows to a Canadian support desk in Ontario. They take the details and pass them to one of our technicians. The call never leaves Canada.

A technician, not a receptionist taking a message and not an automated menu. Wherever possible it is somebody from the pod assigned to your business, who already knows your systems and your history. You will not be asked to explain your setup from scratch, and you will not be handed between departments.

Call 250-412-3785. Every call is answered by a human, 24/7. In business hours the average time to reach a technician is 37 seconds, and those hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:00pm Pacific. Outside them the line is answered by a Canadian support desk in Ontario. They take the details, and unless you have 24/7 cover it reaches one of our technicians the next business morning.

You can also email hello@rtgroup.ca, or open a case in the support portal. If something has stopped your business, phone rather than write.

Everything sits on the client support page: the support portal for opening and tracking cases, live remote support, and the billing portal for invoices and statements.

No. We will never phone you out of the blue and ask you to start a remote support session. Neither will Microsoft or your bank.

If you did not call us first, hang up and call 250-412-3785. If it really was us, we will still be here. Nobody at RTGroup will ever be annoyed with you for checking.

On the phone, an average of 37 seconds to a technician. By email, an average first reply of 14 minutes. Those are measured averages rather than targets we aim at.

24/7 cover is an add-on to fully managed IT. It cannot be bought without it, because covering a night on systems we do not otherwise look after is guesswork at your expense. Scope is the platforms and products we manage.

Without it, an after-hours call is answered by a Canadian support desk in Ontario. They take the details, and one of our technicians picks it up the next business morning.

Probably. We are across Greater Victoria in person and support clients remotely right across British Columbia and Canada. If you are not sure, just ask, and if it turns out not to be a fit we will point you at somebody good.

Yes, and it is becoming common. We go through the questionnaire with you, tell you honestly which answers are currently no, and close the gaps that matter most for the least money.

Often yes, and the rules differ between them. Registered charity status, organisation type and what you do all affect it. We check properly rather than guessing, and we will tell you which ones are not worth your time.

Yes. Robertson Technology Group is locally owned and operated in Victoria, British Columbia, and has been since 2013. Decisions about your account are made here, by people you can meet, rather than at a head office in another province or another country.

Yes, confidently and in complete sentences, which is what makes it dangerous rather than merely wrong. It is fine for a first draft and poor for a fact you have not checked. Training people to recognise that is most of the value in this work, and it is why the output always needs a named human between it and a client.

Usually, with some planning. We separate what is genuinely a project cost from what is ongoing operating cost, and give you figures in a form a grant application will accept.

Not in itself. Mixed-age hardware is normal and much of it has life left. What matters is knowing what you have, which of it can still be protected, and which pieces are genuinely holding you back. That is an audit, not a purchase.

Your people already are, so the choice is not whether but whether you know about it. Beyond that it depends on the work. If your team spends real time on drafting, summarising or going through long documents, there is something here. If they do not, you can wait, and we will tell you that rather than sell you licences.

Volunteers usually need far less access than staff and for a shorter time, which is cheaper as well as safer. Setting that up properly is usually the single biggest improvement available to an organisation your size.

Usually, yes. That is the point of assigning a pod rather than dispatching whoever happens to be free. Somebody who has already been in your server room knows where things are, what changed last time, and why. If a visit needs a specialist you have not met, we tell you who is coming and why.

Support for your staff, patching and monitoring in the background, protection on every device, tested backups, licence review and a quarterly plan. One flat monthly fee, no per-ticket charges, and no being billed for asking a question. See the detail.

Yes, and it is built for exactly that. Co-managed keeps your person in charge and puts the tooling, the coverage and the specialist depth behind them. It is not a route to replacing them, and we would say so if it were.

Yes. Every client is assigned a pod, a small group who learn your people, your systems and your history. You never explain your setup from scratch, and the wider team sits behind them for busy days and specialist work. More on how the pod model works.

No. When you call or write you reach someone with real technical experience who can answer inside the conversation. It also means we can tell you quickly when the honest answer is that you do not need us.

No. Plenty of project work is standalone, and a fair amount of it is for businesses who already have an IT provider or their own IT person. If it turns into a longer relationship afterwards, that is your decision rather than a condition.

No. It describes how support is organised, not how many people do it. Work is assigned to a pod that stays with your business rather than to whoever happens to be free, and the wider team sits behind that pod for the busy days and the specialist problems.

A flat monthly fee, usually worked out per person. We will not quote a number before looking at what you have, because anyone who does is guessing. The first conversation is free and you will leave it with a real figure.

Not if it is set up properly, and we would rather meet them early than be introduced after the decision. They stay in charge, the scope is written down before we start, and most of what we bring is the tooling and cover they have already been asking you for.

Yes, and most do. A common starting point is the tool stack plus holiday cover, then project capacity once everyone has worked together a few times. Paying for parts you already have is how these arrangements sour.

Fixed, for anything we can scope properly, which is most things once we have looked. Open-ended discovery work is the exception and we will say up front when that is what you are buying, along with a ceiling.

No. Fully managed and co-managed clients both get a pod. On co-managed the pod works alongside your own IT person rather than instead of them, and your person stays in charge.

You are covered while you decide what to do next, which is most of the value. Your environment is documented and the credentials are held properly, so the knowledge does not walk out with them. From there you can recruit, or move to fully managed, without doing it in a panic.

Somebody else picks it up, and they can, because your environment is documented rather than carried around in one person’s head. You get a name you do not recognise far less often than you would elsewhere, and when you do, they are not starting from nothing.

Yes, and we would rather be introduced early than arrive as a surprise. Plenty of good providers simply do not have project capacity, and being brought in for a specific piece of work is a normal and healthy arrangement.

Yes, all of it, running the same way it would at a much larger provider. See what is included in fully managed for the full list. Familiarity is about who interprets the results and how the advice is delivered, not about doing less of the work.

That is one of the three common shapes. They keep running the systems from where they are, and we are the local presence in Greater Victoria for the things that need somebody physically there.

Yes, and we will tell you if the quote is reasonable. Sometimes it is, and saying so is worth more to you than a competing proposal. If it is not, you will get a plain explanation of which parts are questionable and why.

A structured thirty days, shaped around your business, with one named person responsible from the first day to the last. We handle the handover from your current provider, including the awkward parts. See exactly how it runs.

No. We work with what you have, tell you honestly what is near the end of its life, and plan replacements around your budget rather than ours.

Yes, and it should be a page rather than a binder. Without one your staff are guessing at what is allowed, usually generously, and a guess is not something you can show a client or an insurer. It needs to say what may go in, what never does, which accounts to use and who checks the output before it goes out.

The truth, in writing, prepared in advance. The question is becoming routine in contracts and insurer questionnaires, and the businesses that struggle are the ones answering it for the first time under pressure. Part of this work is making sure you have that answer ready and that it is accurate.

Between 36 and 60 months, depending on the package and what you add to it. Longer terms cost less each month, and you choose which trade suits you. A shorter term is available and the monthly figure is higher.

Longer terms also often carry no onboarding cost at all, which is worth weighing against the shorter one.

That is a real commitment and we would rather put the number in front of you now than have you find it in a proposal later.

Notice is 90 to 120 days before the end of the term, depending on its length. Give us that and the agreement ends cleanly.

There is a defined offboarding process, and it exists for your protection as much as ours: credentials transferred properly rather than emailed around, access wound down in the right order, and a record of what moved where. Rushing that is how businesses end up with orphaned admin accounts nobody closes.

Your documentation is yours throughout. It was handed to you in your first month and it does not come back to us when you go.

No. Managed print and page plans can run month to month. The only contract involved is a hardware lease, and that is an agreement with the finance company for the machine rather than a commitment to us. If you already own your printers, or you buy them outright, there is nothing to sign beyond the service you are actually using. That is deliberate. A service worth having should not need a five year term to keep you. More on print.

Often nothing. Onboarding is frequently waived on longer term agreements. Whether it is depends on how complex your organisation is and what state we find the existing setup in, both of which we will know by the end of discovery.

You will have the figure, or the confirmation that there is not one, before you commit to anything.

Yes. We offer nonprofit rates, and registered charities in particular may qualify for better ones again. What you land on depends on your status and your size, so it is a short conversation rather than a published table. Talk to us and we will tell you where you sit.

Routinely. The obvious tells people were trained on, poor spelling and clumsy phrasing, have largely gone. The messages are fluent, they reference real details, and voice cloning is now cheap enough to be worth a criminal’s time. The defence is process rather than suspicion: verify a payment change by phoning a number you already had.

No. Most businesses that ask for this are not clients and a good number never become one, which is fine. We ask only that you are authorised to request a test of your organisation, because testing somebody else’s systems without permission is not something we will do.

Only what the workstation sample needs, and only with somebody from your side present or having approved it. Nothing is installed permanently, nothing is changed, and no administrator account is created for us. The external and phishing parts need no access at all.

We come back within one business day to confirm what we are testing. The external part takes a day or two, the workstation sample is about an hour of somebody’s time on your side, and the phishing test runs over roughly a week so it is not all sitting in one inbox at one moment. Then half an hour to go through the report with you.

It depends entirely on the account. A business account with the right settings keeps your material out of training and under an agreement you can show somebody. A personal account signed up for by a staff member is none of those things, and that is what most businesses are actually using. Moving the work onto accounts you control is usually the first thing we do.

Yes, and there is no salesperson attached because we do not have one. You get the external view, a workstation sample, the phishing test, a written report and half an hour going through it. If you want the findings fixed, that is paid work and we will quote it. If you would rather fix them yourself or hand them to somebody else, that is a completely fine outcome.

No, it is an introductory one, and it still gives you a genuinely comprehensive snapshot: what your business shows the internet, how a sample of your real workstations are actually configured, and how your people respond to a convincing message. Most businesses find more than they expected in it.

A full engagement is a larger paid piece of work, where somebody spends days actively trying to get in under an agreed scope. Worth knowing which of the two you have had, because a client or an insurer will eventually ask.

A small sample, usually three to five machines chosen with you, and we look at the things that decide whether an attack succeeds: whether updates are actually landing rather than merely scheduled, whether the protection on the machine is running and current, who holds administrator rights, and whether the disk is encrypted.

We do not read your files, your email or your browsing. It is a configuration check, and it is read only.

It can, and this is the part people are caught out by. Copilot can reach whatever the person using it can already reach, and in most businesses that is far more than anybody realises: old shared folders, a departed manager’s mailbox, a finance file somebody moved somewhere convenient. Nothing surfaced it before because nobody was searching. We tidy the permissions before switching it on.

Not from us. The report says how many people clicked, not who, because the point is to find out where training would help rather than to catch anybody out. We have never seen naming people improve anything. If you want the detail for your own reasons you can ask, but it is not in the report by default.

No. The external part is done from the outside, the way anyone on the internet sees you. The workstation check is read only: nothing is changed, nothing is switched off, and nothing is left installed. The phishing message is a normal email. No passwords are captured at any point.

Anything where somebody who should not be in your systems appears to be in them, or has been recently. Files encrypted with a ransom demand. Sign-ins to a mailbox from somewhere nobody has been. An invoice paid to banking details that turned out to be somebody else’s. A rule quietly forwarding your mail out of the business. Machines behaving oddly all at once.

If you are not sure, that is still worth a phone call. Half the calls we take turn out to be something ordinary, and finding that out takes about fifteen minutes.

No. The first conversation is free and open to any business, whether we have ever spoken before or not.

What we will not do is pretend the situation is simpler than it is. Coming into an environment somebody else built, mid-incident, is the hardest work in this trade. On that first call we will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it, and if we are not, we will tell you who is.

In Canada where your obligations call for it, and documented either way. The point is that the answer takes seconds rather than days, and that you can show it rather than describe it.

That is not a decision to take in the first hour, and it is not ours to make for you. It belongs with your insurer, your lawyer and your directors, in that order.

What is worth knowing while you decide: paying does not always produce a working key, it does not undo anything that was copied out of your business beforehand, and it tends to mark you as a business that pays. There are also sanctions rules in Canada that can make certain payments unlawful, which is precisely why the lawyer belongs in the conversation.

Our job at that point is to buy you the time to decide properly, and to find out whether you need to decide at all.

Where you are exposed, in language you can act on, ranked by what matters rather than by what is easiest to sell. Then the work to close the gaps and the paperwork to prove it to an insurer or a client.

Most businesses do, and replacing it is often not realistic. The answer is to isolate it properly so it cannot be reached from anywhere it should not be, then plan the replacement around your budget rather than around a panic.

Yes, and we would rather you called them before you called us.

Most cyber policies require you to use a response firm from their own panel, and work carried out by anybody else can be refused. That is a real risk to a claim worth far more than our invoice. One phone call to your insurer protects it, and it usually brings you a responder at no cost to you.

If their firm takes the lead, we are happy to work alongside it. Somebody has to know your systems, and that part does not stop being useful.

It is charged at an emergency rate, with a minimum block of hours, and you get both in writing before anybody touches anything.

The first conversation is free and carries no obligation. If at the end of it the answer is that your insurer’s firm should handle this, or that you can close it out yourselves, we will say so and there is nothing to pay.

No. We take incidents at businesses, professional practices, clinics, non-profits and registered organisations only. We do not take personal email accounts, home computers, hacked social media profiles or cryptocurrency recovery.

That is not us being unhelpful. Those cases need different people and different powers. If it is personal, your bank, your local police detachment and the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre are the right first calls, and none of them charge you.

Possibly, and it is worth finding out early rather than late.

Canadian privacy law requires organisations to report a breach of security safeguards to the Privacy Commissioner, and to notify the people affected, where it creates a real risk of significant harm. Your contracts may add obligations of their own, and a regulated profession usually does too.

We are not lawyers and we will not pretend to be. What we can do is help you establish what actually happened and what was reachable, which is the part every one of those decisions depends on.

We can, and we will tell you where that is and is not appropriate. Ongoing control checks and questionnaire responses are fine. Where a board, a funder or a buyer specifically wants independence, they should have it, and we will say so and help you find someone rather than take work we should not.

Ask whoever runs them for the date of the last successful test restore and how long it took. If the answer is a report saying the backup completed, that is not the same thing. We will test what you already have before recommending anything, because sometimes the answer is that it is fine.

Most of it is included. The protective baseline and the audit and compliance work come with fully managed and co-managed IT, built on the CIS Controls. What is quoted separately is the formal program work: the written review, the roadmap, vCISO time, tabletop exercises and penetration testing.

Yes, and more than most people expect. Cloud providers protect against their own failures, not against your staff, your leavers or an account somebody takes over. The provider staying online does not help if the data inside your account is gone.

Most attacks are not aimed at anyone. They are automated, they sweep for whatever is exposed, and a twelve-person business is as reachable as a twelve-hundred-person one. The difference is that the larger one has somebody whose job it is to notice.

You will hear it from us first, privately, with a plan attached rather than just a finding. Almost every audit turns up something, and the ones that do not usually mean the audit was not thorough. Knowing about it is the entire point.

That is a decision for you, your insurer and your lawyer, and we would not make it for you. What we can do is make sure it is a genuine choice rather than the only option, which means copies the attack cannot reach and a restore you have already proven works.

Common, and a sensible reason to call. The questions get harder every year. We go through it question by question, establish which answers are genuinely yes today, and close the gaps before renewal rather than explaining them afterwards. Do not guess on that form. An inaccurate answer can void the cover you are paying for.

For a small business, usually a couple of weeks from starting to a report in your hands, and very little of that is your staff’s time. If you are working to somebody else’s deadline, tell us the date at the first conversation and we will say honestly whether it is achievable.

Less than most providers will sell you, and more than you currently have. It falls out of the two numbers at the top of this page. A twelve-person office does not need a colocation facility, and it does need tested restores and a written plan.

Registered charities and nonprofit organisations may qualify for better rates, so it is worth asking. The scope also tends to be smaller than a commercial audit, and a great deal of what a funder wants can be answered without a full engagement. Ask, and we will tell you what you actually need.

Badly implemented security does, and then people work around it, which leaves you worse off than before. Done properly most of it is invisible, and the parts that are not get explained rather than imposed. If a control is causing genuine friction, that is a design problem and we will say so.

Often, yes. Security is one of the most common reasons businesses take on co-managed IT, because it has grown past what one capable generalist can reasonably hold on their own. We work alongside them, not over them.

That is the normal shape for a business of ten to fifty people. Smaller and simpler can be quicker. Larger, or with a complicated handover, can run longer and we will say so at the start rather than discovering it in week three.

Some of it will not. Something will surface in discovery that nobody knew about, because that is what discovery is for. What you can expect is that we tell you the same day rather than at the review, and that the plan gets updated in front of you.

You do. It is handed over in week four and it stays yours regardless of what happens to our relationship. A provider who keeps the documentation is holding you hostage with paperwork, and we are not interested in that kind of retention.

Rarely, and not in the first thirty days. Onboarding is about taking over what you have and making it reliable. Changing tools is a separate decision, made later, with reasons attached.

No. Nothing you discuss with us goes anywhere, and a conversation commits you to nothing. You tell them when you have decided, on your timing. See 30 Days to Better IT for how the move runs.

Common, and recoverable. Most credentials can be recovered through the vendors directly as the account owner, which is you rather than them. We have done this many times, including where the outgoing provider was slow about it.

You should not be down at all. Our tooling goes on alongside what you already have and nothing is switched over until it is ready. Anything carrying real risk happens outside your working hours.

Worth checking rather than assuming, since notice periods are often shorter than people think. Discovery and preparation can run while your current agreement does, so the switch lands the day your notice ends.

Not necessarily. If what you have is reliable and has life left, we will say so. Replacement is worth it when the running costs, the reliability or the scanning limitations are genuinely costing you more than the device is worth.

Possibly not on cost alone, but it can still be worth it if scanning is part of how work moves through your business, or if confidential documents currently sit in the tray until someone collects them.

You call the same number you call for anything else. No separate print vendor, no explaining your setup to someone new, no being passed between two companies.

Usually whichever fits what you already pay for. If you run Microsoft 365, assess Copilot first. If you run Google Workspace, Gemini. Adding a third vendor is worth it only when there is a job the one you have does badly. We are not tied to any of them and we will say when the honest answer is none of them yet.

We are a Xerox partner, so we know the devices properly rather than supporting six brands badly. Since Xerox acquired Lexmark in 2025 that covers both ranges, which is enough choice to match a machine to an office without being spread so thin that we know none of them well.

Almost certainly not. The five year cycle exists because it suits the industry, not because printers stop working at five years. If yours has been looked after and still does the job, keeping it and maintaining it is usually the better decision. We will tell you honestly which case you are in.

Often, and not always. It is usually cheaper for an office printing enough that toner and servicing are a real line item. For a business with one low-use printer it frequently is not, and we will tell you that rather than sell you a contract. What it always buys is predictability.

Very likely. Most businesses we review are paying for seats nobody has logged into in months. We review it yearly, and that review has paid for itself more than once.

No. Buying through us usually gets better value and means the team that recommended it supports it, but you are free to buy elsewhere and we will still help you choose well.

Yes, and it is straightforward. Your data does not move and nobody notices a change. It usually comes with a licence review attached, because that is where the immediate saving tends to be.

Sometimes. It trades a large occasional purchase for a predictable monthly cost, which helps cash flow and budgeting, but over several years the totals can land close together. Where cloud usually wins outright is access, resilience and not having to replace anything in year five.

On the sticker, sometimes not. On the total, usually yes, because the comparison is rarely like for like. A business machine with on-site warranty and business-grade Windows against a consumer one is a different purchase, and the setup time and downtime are real costs that never appear on the invoice.

It can be, and for healthcare, legal and public-sector work it usually should be. Microsoft operates Canadian regions, and it is set at the time the tenant is created, so it is worth deciding deliberately rather than discovering later.

Some people get real value from it and some do not, so the honest answer is to try it with a few staff before licensing everyone. Worth knowing first: it surfaces whatever a person already has access to, so if your file permissions are untidy it will find things people were not supposed to see. Tidy permissions first.

It is a cash flow and tax question more than a technical one, so it is worth asking your accountant with both numbers in front of you. We will quote it either way, on Lenovo hardware or on whatever you would rather we priced. Leasing suits businesses replacing on a strict cycle; buying usually suits those keeping equipment longer.

It becomes a great deal more important, which is a real consideration rather than a detail. For most businesses that means a second connection as a fallback, and it is part of the costing rather than a surprise afterwards.

Business machines generally have three to five good years in them, and the right moment depends on the person rather than the calendar. The test worth applying is whether waiting is costing you more in lost time than replacing would cost outright. Often it is, and nobody has done the arithmetic.

Usually, yes, and it is more common than people realise. It is normally the records that tell other mail systems your email is genuinely yours being missing or wrong. It is a configuration job rather than a mystery, and it is worth doing because the same records make it harder for somebody to impersonate your domain.

Usually, and it is a common reason people call. Most of the time it is a handful of things rather than the whole design: licensing bought wrong, one application in the wrong place, or the network never adjusted for everything now going out to the internet.

Usually a placement problem rather than a hardware one, and adding another access point in the wrong spot often makes it worse. It wants surveying properly first. The answer is frequently cheaper than expected and occasionally involves cabling, which is the part people are hoping to avoid. We build coverage on Meraki or UniFi depending on the site.