Managed IT Services for Logistics & Warehousing in the GTA

A warehouse runs on handheld scanners, label printers, the warehouse management system (WMS), and often EDI links to customers and carriers. When Wi-Fi drops in one aisle, pickers stop. When the EDI connection fails overnight, orders do not arrive and nobody notices until the morning.

Scanner Wi-Fi is designed from the racking plan, not the empty building. Steel racking full of product absorbs signal, so access points go where the aisles are, at a height that clears the stock, and the survey is repeated after a re-rack. Scanners and printers sit on their own network segment, separate from office PCs and from any building systems.

For EDI and the WMS, the useful controls are monitoring and a second internet line. Watch the EDI connection and the WMS server as services, not just whether the box is powered on, so a stalled queue raises an alert. A cellular or second-carrier backup line on the firewall keeps labels printing when the main circuit is cut.

Warehouses hire seasonally and through agencies, and staff move between shifts. The common gap is shared logins: one account on the dock PC, one carrier-portal password on a label taped to the monitor. When someone leaves, nothing is removed because nothing was theirs.

Give every worker a named login, even on shared terminals, with a fast badge or PIN sign-in where the WMS supports it. Tie account creation and removal to the agency start and end dates, and run a monthly check of active accounts against the current roster. Our offboarding checklist lists every place an account hides.

The attack that costs this sector most is not ransomware. It is an email, apparently from a carrier, broker or customer, saying their banking details have changed. The attacker often has access to a real mailbox and replies inside a real thread, so the message looks right.

The control is a written rule, applied every time: any change to payment details is confirmed by phone to a number already on file, never one in the email, and a second person approves it before the next payment runs. Add multi-factor sign-in on every mailbox and carrier portal, and DMARC on your own domain so nobody can send invoices as you. Our payment verification procedure is a template you can adopt.

If money has already gone, call your bank first, then report to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.

Most logistics firms hold more personal information than they think: driver licences and abstracts, employee records, consignee names and addresses, sometimes customs paperwork. In Ontario, a private-sector firm's handling of customer personal information falls under PIPEDA. A breach that creates a real risk of significant harm must be reported to the Privacy Commissioner and the affected people notified; the OPC's guidance explains the test.

This page is practical guidance, not legal advice; confirm how the law applies to your organization with counsel.

Large shippers and retailers now send security questionnaires before awarding or renewing contracts. Expect questions on multi-factor sign-in, endpoint protection, backups and restore testing, who has remote access to the WMS, and how you would respond to an incident. Cyber insurers ask much the same at renewal.

Answer from what is actually deployed, with evidence. Our guide to answering vendor security questionnaires shows how. Vendor remote access to the WMS deserves its own policy: time-limited, multi-factor, and logged (third-party remote access policy). Before you talk to any provider, test your domain with our email spoofing check and work through the printable IT risk self-check.