Frequently Asked Questions

Yes! You definitely can hire your own IT person, and in fact we’d be happy to provide you with a free consultation to see if that’s a better choice for you than an MSP. Imagine that, a company willing to have a conversation about options OTHER THAN what they’re selling. We work with several businesses that have their own IT staff but those individuals are either too specialized or not specialized enough to cover the ground that we can together.

MSP stands for Managed Service Provider, meaning not only do we take care of stand-alone problems, but we handle the IT side of your business in its entirety to PREVENT those one-off issues from being so devastating to deal with.

Honestly that’s exactly why you should consider it. Every business these days has some footprint in the digital world, even if it’s just a few cell phones and maybe a couple of laptops. Rather than stressing out your poor overworked administrator with finding you a laptop, you could be asking all your “techie” questions to professionals who live in that world every single day. Comparatively, a quality in-house IT person will cost you a minimum of $60,000 per year, and we will do the work they would (AND MORE!) for a fraction of the cost.

PIPEDA stands for Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act which is the Government of Canada's legislation managed by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. It's the set of rules that every business in Canada must adhere to as of 2018.

PII stands for Personally Identifiable Information, which can be any of the following: Client or employee names, age, ID numbers, income, ethnic origin, blood type, employee files, credit records, loan records, medical records, opinions, evaluations, social status, disciplinary actions, or even dispute records.

YES! Absolutely yes. As of 2018 all commercial entities in Canada which conduct business with employees or clients MUST adhere to guidelines and rules outlined by PIPEDA. The human-being version of what this means is that if at any point you are storing PII you must have systems in place to protect this information, as well as descriptions and reports of systems in place to protect the information. Because we know that this includes nearly every single business in Canada we’ve taken our Cybersecurity offerings and chopped the price down as low as possible to make the cost of entry far more palatable for businesses of every size.

Likely not nearly as much as you’d think. We thought hard about just including our price sheet (which we will happily send you!) right here on the website but we’ve found that businesses often over-shoot the expected costs without the correct context of what they would actually need. We would much rather you reach out for a free consultation and we will provide you with a quote for the services you actually need, cutting out the fluff and nonsense that other MSPs hide in their generic pricing schemes.

We’re thrilled to hear you’re leaning towards reaching out to us! Mark Six is a team of two born and raised Albertans, powered by world class tools that we personally use and have curated into best-fit solution for our clients. When it’s time to reach out we’ve got plenty of options, every single one of which puts you directly in contact with us, not a call centre “with longer than usual hold times”, not a help desk where your question is lost forever, or whatever other nonsense some companies offer. • Give us a call, we’ll pick up the phone. • Send us an email, we’ll send you a reply personally • Ask us to come out to you, and we’ll pack up the truck Anything more complicated than that just isn't acceptable.

That’s truly the reality of doing business these days. If you have any information that you should be protecting, whether it’s client or employee PII, or even internal documentation regarding technologies, processes, proprietary products or intelligence and you expect that it’s covered in the event of loss (theft, destruction, deletion etc) then you have to had protections in place to attempt to secure it. It’s the same as trying to claim insurance for a TV was stolen from your home, the insurance company is going to be really hesitant if you left all your doors off their hinges 24/7 and have no record of the TV ever being there and can’t describe what it looked like or where you kept it. Here are just a few examples of REAL questions asked by an insurance provider to a business right here in Alberta: • Do you have access control procedures and hard drive encryption to prevent unauthorized access on your databases, servers, and data files? • Do you install critical and high severity patches across your enterprise within one month? • Have you tested the successful restoration and recovery of key server configurations and data from backups? - If yes, how often are backups tested for restoration and recovery of key server configurations and data? Can't answer those questions? Probably means it's long overdue that you looked at our Managed Services.

It’s a great question! Honestly most of the business we take over from other Managed Service Providers happens because the client couldn’t understand what they were talking about or a short investigation revealed that in fact they weren’t doing the work they were charging for (or they were charging WAY TOO MUCH). We have our own internal compliance standards we adhere to, as well as federally regulated protocols for aspects of our business that we must remain in compliance with 100% of the time to even offer the services. Feel confident that you can request a full breakdown of all the work completed over any period of time and we will happily bore you with all the reports and tickets and internal notes we’ve made regarding your service to maintain our own internally required standards.