Enterprise networking in Canada, built by CCIE architects

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Trusted by

  • Broadcom
  • SSENSE
  • Mondou
  • Western University
  • Votatec
  • Ren's Pets
  • City of Mississauga
The work

Enterprise networking, three pillars, one operator.

One Canadian team owns the design, the build, and the cutover, start to finish.

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  1. Data centre fabric

    Cisco ACI and Nexus VXLAN spine-leaf fabrics, designed for micro-segmentation and multi-site, without the guesswork.

  2. Campus and access

    Catalyst Center and SD-Access, formerly DNA Center (DNAC), give you policy-based segmentation across every campus and branch.

  3. Assessment and design

    Network assessment and network design services that find the risk before it finds your production traffic.

By industry

Does Enterprise Networking work the same way in every industry?

No. The Enterprise Networking work is the same craft in every sector, but the conditions around it are not. In manufacturing that means production lines that can't stop for a patch window; in energy and mining, SCADA networks and remote sites that can't go offline. We keep the service and change the part that bends.

  • A network designed for machines that don't reboot on demand.

    OT and IT convergence. A flat network between plant and office is the common failure, and segmentation is the fix. It's a design problem, not a purchase.

    • Patch windows
    • Legacy equipment
    • ISO 22301
    Manufacturing IT

  • Kit specified for the environment, not the catalogue.

    SCADA and ICS. Availability outranks confidentiality here, and you often can't take a system offline to investigate what happened on it.

    • Bill C-8 and the CCSPA
    • Remote-site connectivity
    • ISO 22301
    Energy and mining IT
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What do you need from Enterprise Networking?

Tell us who you are and what you're working on. A senior engineer reads your message before replying, so the first answer is a real read on scope, risk and timing, within an hour, 24/7. Nothing here is a commitment, and we'll tell you plainly if we're not the right fit.

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Enterprise Networking

What happens next

  1. A senior engineer replies within an hour, 24/7, never an SDR.
  2. We book a 30-minute call to listen, sketch options, and flag risks.
  3. You get a scoped statement of work within 3 business days.

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The deep dive

Enterprise networking in Canada, made real.

I run these builds myself, so here's how enterprise networking actually plays out on Canadian production networks.

Fabric, policy, and assurance.

Good enterprise networking has three moving parts that have to agree: the fabric, the policy, and the assurance layer. The fabric is your Nexus spine-leaf or your ACI underlay. Policy is how traffic is allowed to move, usually SD-Access segments or ACI contracts. Assurance is the telemetry that tells you it's all working. When those three drift apart, you get outages nobody can explain and a war room at midnight. We keep them inside one design so they can't.

How we work.

We work in the open. You get direct access to the architect doing the build, not an account layer that relays messages. Your real risk isn't the technology, it's the cutover window and the state nobody wrote down. So we map the current state first, stage the change in a lab, and keep a tested rollback ready. If a migration has to pause, your production traffic never feels it.

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Tell us what you run today and what keeps breaking. A senior SMEnode engineer replies within an hour with a first read on scope, risk and timing. No sales handoff.

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The method

How an enterprise network project runs in Canada.

Every enterprise networking project we run in Canada follows the same order, because skipping steps is how outages happen. We assess before we design, we design before we touch anything, and we test the failure path before the cutover. You see each stage, sign off on each stage, and nothing reaches production until the rollback is proven. Here's the sequence, start to finish.

Engagement phases

Phases 01 to 04

  1. Assess

    We map what you actually have: the fabric, the routing, the policy, and the gaps. No vendor bias, no assumptions. You get a written picture of the current state and the risks inside it, in plain language, before anyone proposes a single change.

  2. Design

    Then we design the target: ACI or SD-Access, the segmentation model, failure domains, and the migration path. We fold network security services into the design here, not after, so segmentation and access control ship together.

  3. Build and test

    We build in a staging fabric first and test the failure path. Pull a link, drop a node, watch it reconverge. The rollback is written and rehearsed before we book a window.

  4. Cut over and hand off

    Cutovers run in a controlled window with the rollback on standby. Once you're stable, we hand off clean documentation and, if you want, we run the network for you. You keep direct access to the architect who built it, not a ticket queue.

Questions

Enterprise networking questions, answered straight.

These are the questions CTOs actually ask me before an enterprise networking project. Straight answers, written by the engineer who'll run yours.

Enterprise networking is the design, build, and operation of the network that carries a whole organisation's traffic: data centre fabric, campus, branch, and the policy that governs all of it. For most Canadian firms that means Cisco ACI or Nexus in the data centre and SD-Access in the campus, tied together with segmentation and assurance so the network stays fast, secure, and predictable under load.

Most projects run 6 to 16 weeks from assessment to final cutover, though scope drives it. A single data centre fabric refresh is faster; a multi-site ACI build with campus SD-Access sits at the longer end. We price by defined scope, not by the hour, so you get a fixed number before we start. Assessment first is what keeps surprise change orders off the invoice later.

Yes. We can keep your network data, telemetry, and configuration backups inside Canada, on Canadian infrastructure, which matters for public-sector and regulated clients. Data residency is a design decision we make with you up front, not a bolt-on afterward. Our team works bilingually, English and French, and we build with Canadian privacy expectations in mind from the first day of the engagement.

Yes, security is part of the same design, not a separate afterthought. We build segmentation, 802.1X and NAC, and firewall policy into the network from the start, because bolting security on after cutover is how gaps appear. Same architects, one design, so you never have to hand off between a networking vendor and a security vendor and hope they agree.

At the end you get a working network, a tested rollback you hopefully never needed, and documentation your team can actually use: topology, addressing, policy, and runbooks. If you want us to keep running it, we offer 24/7 monitoring and support. If you'd rather run it in-house, we transfer the knowledge so your team owns it outright. No lock-in.

Usually, yes. Most of the work is additive: we build alongside, validate, then cut over in a window you choose. Where a change genuinely cannot be made live we say so during design rather than on the night. You get the rollback plan before the change, and we do not start a cutover we cannot reverse.
Keep exploring

Where this work connects.

These disciplines share the same senior team and tend to land together. Follow the thread to the next one.

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