If your business runs across Kitchener, Waterloo and the tri-cities, whether that is one office or several, you need managed IT that covers every site the same way. NFD is your single regional managed IT and cloud partner: multi-site coverage, cloud migration and Microsoft 365, backup and disaster recovery, and a 24/7 helpdesk with a 15-minute critical response target.
Need day-to-day IT support rather than a full agreement — someone to call when something breaks, and someone on site? That runs from our office at 22 Frederick Street in downtown Kitchener, with engineers dispatched across Waterloo Region, usually the same day. See our Waterloo IT support page, or start with a free external security scan if you want an outside look first.
Tell us your headcount, your sites, and roughly what you are running. We will come back with a scope and a price for it — not a brochure.
We reply within one business day. We do not share your data.
Tell us what you are running and what is currently going wrong with it. We will assess it properly, put the scope in writing, and give you a number against that scope. If a managed agreement is not the right shape for your business, we would rather tell you at this stage than twelve months in.
We reply within one business day. We do not share your data.
Most arguments between a business and its IT provider are scope arguments. They happen months later, on an invoice, over something both parties assumed the other was handling. So both lists get written down before anything starts, and the second list matters as much as the first.
Where something genuinely falls between the two lists, we would rather resolve it in a review meeting than discover it on a bill.
The agreement runs from our office at 22 Frederick Street, Suite 700, in downtown Kitchener. Engineers are dispatched across Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge and the wider Waterloo Region, usually the same day, for anything the remote desk cannot clear.
We do not publish a per-user rate on this page, because a single figure would be wrong for most of the businesses reading it. What we can do is be specific about the mechanics, so you can work out roughly where you would land before you speak to anyone.
Pricing is built on the number of people who use IT, the number of servers and network devices under management, and the number of physical sites. Those three inputs cover most environments. A twenty-person professional services firm on Microsoft 365 with no server is a different proposition from a twenty-person manufacturer with a production line, a legacy application, and a server room that runs warm — and the price should reflect that rather than average it away.
Upwards: multiple sites, machinery or equipment that depends on the network, an application that only runs on an unsupported operating system, a regulatory obligation, staff working across several time zones, and any environment where nobody has kept records.
Downwards: standardised hardware, a single site, users already on Microsoft 365 rather than a mix, consistent laptop models, and an internal person who can act as our contact.
Agreements typically run annually, with monthly billing based on your current headcount rather than the headcount you had at signing. Hire six people and the number moves in the month they start; lose six and it moves back. A quote is valid against the environment we assessed — if discovery turns up something materially different from what was described, we say so and requote rather than absorb it quietly and recover it later through project work.
Plenty of businesses in Kitchener and Waterloo run perfectly well on hourly IT support, and we do that work too. It is worth being clear about what actually changes, because the honest differences are not the ones usually advertised.
The incentive inverts. Under an hourly arrangement, the provider is paid for time spent. Under a managed agreement, the provider absorbs the time, so anything recurring — the printer that drops off the network every fortnight, the application that has to be reinstalled monthly — becomes our cost to eliminate rather than our revenue to keep servicing.
Preventative work stops needing approval. Patching, backup verification, firmware, and certificate renewals happen because they are in scope, not because someone in your business signed off a purchase order for them.
Your staff stop rationing. When each call has a visible price attached, people wait, work around the problem, and let small faults accumulate. Removing the per-call cost surfaces the issues early, which is usually where the money is.
Budgeting becomes possible. One line item, adjusted for headcount, instead of an unpredictable figure that spikes in exactly the months you can least afford it.
If you have fewer than about ten staff, standard laptops, everything already in Microsoft 365, and no server, a managed agreement may cost more than it saves. Say so and we will quote hourly instead — that option is set out on our IT support page. The point of scoping properly is to reach the right answer, including when the right answer is the smaller one.
The choice is not really about size. It is about whether the knowledge of your environment should sit inside your business or outside it.
We are your IT department. We hold the tooling, the documentation, the vendor relationships, and the accountability. This suits businesses with no internal technical staff, and businesses where the person who has been handling IT is doing it on top of a job they were actually hired for.
You keep your internal person or team, and we cover what one or two people cannot reasonably hold: after-hours and holiday cover, security operations, specialist projects, and the enterprise tooling that is hard to justify at your licence count. You decide the split, and it is written into the agreement rather than left to develop informally. The detail — how the split is set, what it costs against hiring, and how to start small — is on our co-managed IT page.
Businesses move between the two. Co-managed arrangements often begin when an internal hire is imminent and end when they are established, or the reverse when that person leaves.
Cloud solutions in Kitchener–Waterloo are usually sold as a destination. In practice they are a set of decisions, most of which are reversible and some of which are expensive to get wrong.
Nearly every business we onboard is already paying for Microsoft 365. Far fewer have conditional access configured, retention policies set, external sharing controlled, or multi-factor enforced on every account rather than most of them. Under a managed agreement, that configuration is our responsibility to establish and keep correct as Microsoft changes it underneath you. Our Microsoft practice page covers the optimisation work in more depth.
Not everything belongs in the cloud, and we will tell you when it does not. Line-of-business applications common in local manufacturing and professional services often run better and cheaper on a well-maintained local server than on a lifted-and-shifted virtual machine that bills by the hour. The useful question is which workloads move, in what order, and what the licensing does when they do.
Where staff work across sites, from home, or on machines you do not own, a hosted desktop keeps the data in one controlled place rather than scattered across endpoints. It is the right answer less often than it is proposed, and we would rather size it honestly than sell it broadly.
Part of onboarding is a licence reconciliation. It routinely finds two things: subscriptions still being paid for people who left, and capability already included in the licences you hold that was switched off and forgotten. The second usually funds a meaningful part of the agreement.
Transitions are where managed IT relationships fail, so this part is deliberately structured.
We take administrative access, document what exists, and build an asset and licence register. We work with your outgoing provider where that is possible and around them where it is not; either way you keep the records. Expect this week to produce findings you did not want, because it usually does: shared administrative accounts, backups that have not had a restore tested, hardware past end of support, and at least one system nobody in the business currently owns.
Monitoring, endpoint security, patch management, and backup agents are deployed to every covered device. Multi-factor authentication is enforced where it is missing. Your staff are introduced to the service desk, told how to reach it, and given a single answer to the question “who do I call now”.
Every environment arrives with a list of things that have been deferred. We work it in order of risk rather than order of annoyance, and we show you the list so you can disagree with the order. Anything on it that qualifies as a project gets quoted separately rather than being absorbed silently and then rushed.
The agreement settles into a rhythm: daily support, monthly patching and backup verification, and scheduled reviews. The point of a good first month is that the following months are dull.
An agreement that is only looked at when something goes wrong is not being managed.
Quarterly, with someone who can make decisions on our side and yours. We cover ticket volume and what is driving it, outstanding risks, hardware approaching end of life, licence position, and the next twelve months of expected spend. Businesses under fifteen staff often prefer twice a year; that is fine, and it is written into the agreement rather than negotiated later.
Monthly reporting covering ticket volumes and categories, patch compliance across your estate, backup and restore verification, and security events handled. The purpose is to show you where your IT time is going, because the pattern usually points at a fixable cause.
Your environment documentation, asset register, licence records, and network diagrams belong to you and are handed over on request at any point in the relationship, not only at the end of it.
We hold a SOC 2 Type 2 attestation. That means an independent auditor has examined how we handle client data, manage access, and control change over a period of time — not a questionnaire we filled in about ourselves. If your own clients or insurers ask about the security posture of your suppliers, this is the part that answers them.
There is a defined offboarding process, and it is in the agreement from the start: administrative credentials returned, documentation handed over, and a cooperative transition to whoever comes next. A client staying because leaving is painful is not a client relationship worth defending.
Yes, and Cambridge and Guelph with it. Our office is at 22 Frederick St, Suite 700 in Kitchener, and onsite attendance across the region is dispatched from there. Multiple sites affect the price, not the eligibility.
Most of our managed clients sit between roughly ten and two hundred staff. Below ten, hourly support is often the better economic answer and we will say so. Above two hundred, the conversation usually becomes co-managed rather than fully managed, because at that size an internal function already exists.
No — it points towards co-managed. Your internal person keeps the relationships, the context, and the day-to-day; we cover depth, cover, and the specialisms one person cannot reasonably hold. See co-managed IT.
Agreements are normally annual, because the first month is heavily loaded with work we absorb. Shorter and month-to-month arrangements exist and cost more, which is an honest reflection of that loading rather than a penalty.
Not as a condition of signing. Some of our monitoring, security, and backup tooling has to be deployed for us to be accountable for those outcomes, and that is stated in the scope. Beyond that, we work with the hardware, applications, and suppliers you already have, and any recommendation to change comes with the reason and the number attached.
Break-fix pays for the fix. A managed agreement pays for the outcome, which means the recurring faults become our problem to remove. The full comparison is in the hourly-versus-monthly section above, and ad-hoc support remains available on our IT support page.
It depends on headcount, sites, servers, and how much you want inside the scope. Rather than publish a figure that would not apply to you, we assess the environment and quote against it. The assessment is not chargeable and you keep the findings regardless of what you decide.
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