Cybersecurity Company in Montreal

There are three distinct products behind a Montreal security question: a scoped security assessment at Montreal rates, penetration testing engagements, or incident response retainers. Scope drivers include Law 25 PIA review, OSFI B-13 or ITSG-33 control mapping, threat modelling, vulnerability scanning, and a written report with bilingual French Quebec executive summary if Charter obligations apply. Montreal rates sit comparable to Toronto, above Ottawa, below New York. USD pricing for crossborder accounts is parity-adjusted. We give fixed-fee proposals rather than open T and M.

Law 25 reshaped Quebec private sector privacy with the steepest fines in Canadian law (CAD $25M or 4 percent of worldwide turnover), mandatory breach notification to the CAI and affected individuals when a confidentiality incident presents a risk of serious injury, mandatory PIAs (Evaluations des facteurs relatifs a la vie privee) for any project involving personal information processing or technology that may have an impact on privacy, mandatory designation of a person in charge of personal information (the DPO role), transparent automated decision-making with a right to human review, and crossborder transfer assessment obligations as of September 2023. We embed Law 25 obligations into every security engagement: PIA template aligned with CAI guidance, breach playbook with the CAI notification timeline, automated decision-making disclosure language for any AI-touching feature, and transfer assessments documented for every crossborder data flow. The Charter of the French Language (Bill 96) applies to all client-facing privacy and security artefacts in Quebec.

Yes. Bill 96 strengthened the Charter of the French Language and applies French language obligations to a wider set of client-facing materials, including privacy notices, security incident communications to affected individuals, contract documents in some scenarios, and any consumer-facing security UI text. Our HQ team works in English and we coordinate French Quebec deliverables through a vetted Montreal partner network with native speakers who hold OQLF (Office quebecois de la langue francaise) discipline. Critical artefacts (breach notifications to affected individuals, privacy notices, automated decision-making disclosures, terms of service updates) are delivered in bilingual format with French as the primary language for Quebec residents. For Quebec-only programs we will recommend a Montreal-based lead vendor rather than oversell our in-house French coverage, because Bill 96 reality demands native fluency we are honest about not having directly on payroll.

Yes. Quebec financial sector security is shaped by Desjardins's 2019 insider breach (the largest in Canadian financial history at the time, leading to CAD $200M+ in costs and a regulatory and class action overhang that still shapes industry posture on insider threat, identity, and data loss prevention), OSFI Cyber Security Self-Assessment expectations, OSFI Guideline B-13 on Technology and Cyber Risk Management (effective January 2024), AMF Quebec requirements, and the Bank of Canada Retail Payments Activities Act for fintechs and payment service providers. We ship programs with insider threat detection (UEBA on Sentinel or Splunk), data loss prevention (Microsoft Purview, Symantec, or Forcepoint), strong identity (CyberArk PAM, Okta or Entra ID for workforce, MFA universally), and the 24-hour material technology and cyber incident notification flow OSFI now requires for federally regulated financial institutions.

Yes. Hydro-Quebec runs grid interconnections under NERC CIP (because it sells into the US Northeast and PJM markets), and provincial critical infrastructure operators run under CSA CIOSC standards, the Canadian Cyber Security Strategy, and the proposed Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act (CCSPA) under Bill C-26. We deliver OT security programs with Claroty, Nozomi Networks, or Microsoft Defender for IoT for industrial protocol visibility (Modbus, DNP3, IEC 61850, ICCP), IT-OT segmentation reviews, Purdue Model alignment, and tabletop exercises for grid and utility scenarios. We do not pretend to be Mandiant on ICS forensics, and for major incidents we coordinate with the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and specialised ICS-IR firms. For aerospace OT (Bombardier, CAE manufacturing floors) we apply ITSG-33 and CMMC-equivalent controls.

CGI's Montreal HQ shapes the regional consulting standard, and we benchmark our delivery to that bar without pretending to be CGI scale. We ship SOC consulting (Sentinel or Splunk build, runbook authoring, detection engineering with Sigma rules, MITRE ATT&CK coverage analysis), virtual CISO retainers for mid-market clients who do not need a full executive headcount, and security program build for fintech and healthcare clients targeting SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 certification (typically twelve to eighteen months from gap analysis to clean audit). For SOC 24/7 operations we partner with a vetted Quebec-based MSSP rather than oversell our coverage, because round-the-clock T1 and T2 analyst headcount is genuinely a different business model from project-based consulting and incident response retainer work.

Canadian aerospace and defense primes (Bombardier Defense, CAE Defence and Security, Lockheed Martin Canada Montreal operations, Pratt and Whitney Canada) operate under Government of Canada ITSG-33 IT Security Risk Management framework, the Canadian Controlled Goods Program, and US CMMC 2.0 flow-downs from prime contractors when the work touches US Department of Defense supply chains. We ship to ITSG-33 control catalogues with documented System Security Plans, POA&Ms (Plans of Action and Milestones), and evidence libraries. For CMMC-aligned work we use AWS GovCloud (US) or Azure Government Cloud as the cloud control plane, hardened Linux endpoints with FIPS 140-3 validated crypto, and US person handling boundaries where ITAR or controlled goods status applies. We coordinate with the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security on critical findings and the client's Controlled Goods Program officer for goods-controlled artefacts.

Under Law 25, an enterprise must notify the CAI Quebec and the affected individuals with diligence (avec diligence) when a confidentiality incident presents a risk of serious injury (un risque qu'un prejudice serieux soit cause). The CAI has interpreted this as requiring notification without unnecessary delay once the incident and the risk are identified. Records of all confidentiality incidents (not only those triggering notification) must be kept and made available to the CAI on request. For OSFI-regulated financial institutions, the technology and cyber incident reporting requirement adds a 24-hour notification window for material incidents. For crossborder breaches affecting non-Quebec Canadians, PIPEDA's real risk of significant harm standard and OPC notification flow apply in parallel. Our IR retainer includes a written playbook in English and bilingual French with the CAI form pre-templated and the OSFI flow documented.