Pathway Communications: Thirty Years of Keeping Canadian Data in Canada

The Markham-based Tech Business of the Year 2024 (and 2023 at the CanadianSME National Business Awards) runs its own Tier III design certified data centre and makes a case more small businesses should hear: where your data lives, and who controls it, is now a business question.

Ask most small business owners where their customer data is stored and the answer is often a shrug, or the name of a software vendor. Ask where the backups are kept, who operates the servers and which country’s laws apply, and the conversation usually stops there.

Pathway Communications has built a three-decade business on being able to answer those questions. Its proposition to clients is simple: keep Canadian data in Canada, with a Canadian company accountable for it.

Ownership as a Service Feature

In managed IT services, that is a substantive claim rather than a patriotic one.

Two terms are often used interchangeably but mean different things. Data residency describes where information is physically stored. Data sovereignty concerns the legal and jurisdictional framework that applies to it. A server can sit in Toronto and still be operated by a company whose home-country laws may reach the data on it. 

A provider whose ownership and infrastructure are both Canadian takes part of that question off the table. For organizations managing health information, financial records, legal documents, intellectual property, or government data, which can simplify decisions about where sensitive workloads should reside.

For Ashok Kalle, Pathway’s Founder and CEO, that clarity has become more important as organizations move critical workloads into cloud and managed environments.

“Canadian businesses should know where their critical data resides, who is responsible for protecting it, and which jurisdictions may apply to it,” Kalle says. “Keeping sensitive workloads in Canada gives organizations greater visibility and control over their data, while helping them address the security, privacy and trust expectations of their customers.”

Founded in 1995, Pathway serves around 2,500 customers from its Markham headquarters and offices in Victoria, Saskatoon, and Montreal.

An Unusually Deep Certification Stack

For a company of its size, Pathway carries an extensive set of credentials.

Its data centre and compliance portfolio includes Tier III Design certification from the Uptime Institute, ISO 9001:2015, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, ISO 27018:2019 and SOC 2 Type II (Colocation & Cloud Services)

The practical value shows up in procurement.

Enterprise, healthcare, and public-sector buyers increasingly expect independently assessed security, privacy, and operational controls from their technology suppliers, and supporting a standard is different from being audited against it. Pathway’s certifications give its clients evidence they can put straight into their own vendor assessments and compliance programs.

The Tier III designation matters most to organizations placing mission-critical systems in the facility. The Markham data centre has redundant power, cooling and network infrastructure, physical security controls and round-the-clock monitoring, and Pathway backs it with a minimum 99.999 per cent uptime SLA.

The Full Stack, Including the Parts Nobody Advertises

The service range is broad: managed IT and outsourcing, IT audits, help desk, data centre and colocation, managed cloud, backup and disaster recovery, managed cybersecurity including detection and response and a Security Operations Centre, IT service management, business internet, email and web hosting, and business phone systems.

Two elements stand out. The first is an SAP practice covering hosting, cloud migration and ongoing support, a demanding specialism that suits mid-market manufacturers and distributors running SAP without the internal team needed to support the entire environment.

The second says something about the company’s character. Pathway still offers residential internet services. Few providers would enter that business today; Pathway simply has not walked away from the customers who still rely on it. 

For smaller businesses, though, the more relevant point is that Canadian data residency no longer requires building a data centre. Pathway’s Markham facility supports colocation, private and managed cloud, managed hosting, and backup and disaster recovery, which puts Canadian-hosted infrastructure within reach of companies that lack the capital, specialist staff, or scale to run their own.

For an SMB, that might mean keeping critical servers in a Canadian colocation facility, running workloads in a Canadian private cloud, holding backup and disaster recovery copies domestically, or a combination of the three.

References From Demanding Buyers

Pathway’s client references come from sectors that do not hand out praise lightly.

An executive at a provincial health agency describes the company as meeting or exceeding service levels and proving a capable, trusted partner. An IT director at a community living organization credits the team with going beyond expectations to keep systems secure, and a director at an autism services organization points to round-the-clock security operations support for strengthening protection of staff and client information.

Those endorsements carry weight because public-sector and health-related buyers typically procure formally, measure suppliers against defined service levels and work in environments where privacy and availability are not optional.

What Owners Should Take From It

The lesson for other business owners is that data residency is no longer just an enterprise IT topic.

Cloud services have made infrastructure easier to buy, but they have also made it harder to see where business data actually goes. For routine workloads, that may not matter much. For a company handling customer records, health information, legal files, financial records, or government contracts, it can.

Increasingly, the question comes from a customer or a procurement team rather than a regulator.

A growing company bidding on a major contract may suddenly be asked where customer information is stored, where its backups reside, who operates the infrastructure and what security controls protect it.

A business that cannot answer has handed its competitors an easy advantage.

The first step costs nothing. Find out where your critical data physically lives, where the backups are kept, who runs the infrastructure and which jurisdictions apply.

If the answers are unclear, ask your provider. If your provider cannot answer, that tells you something too.

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Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available information intended only for informational purposes. CanadianSME Small Business Magazine does not endorse or guarantee any products or services mentioned. Readers are advised to conduct their research and due diligence before making business decisions.