What Canadian businesses need to know about PIPEDA privacy requirements and SOC 2 compliance, and how managed IT helps meet both.
A few years ago, one of our clients, a mid-size financial advisory firm in the GTA, lost a major prospect. The deal was practically signed. Then the prospect's legal team asked for documentation proving how client data was stored, encrypted, and retained. Our client had nothing to show them. Good security practices were in place, but none of it was documented in a way that satisfied a compliance review. That deal went to a competitor who could produce the paperwork. This is the compliance gap I keep running into with Canadian businesses. They understand cybersecurity matters. They invest in tools. But when a client, a partner, or a regulator asks them to prove it, they come up short. Two frameworks keep surfacing in those conversations: PIPEDA and SOC 2. What PIPEDA Actually Requires The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) is federal privacy legislation that applies to any business collecting, using, or disclosing personal information during commercial activity. If you handle customer names, email addresses, financial records, or health data, PIPEDA applies to you. The law is built around ten fair information principles, but the ones that trip up small and mid-size businesses most often are accountability, consent, and safeguards. Accountability means you need a designated privacy officer (this can be the owner or an existing employee, it doesn't require a new hire). Consent means you need to explain to people what you're collecting and why, in plain language. Safeguards means you need security controls appropriate to the sensitivity of the data. "Appropriate" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that last point. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner doesn't hand you a checklist. They expect you to assess the risk and respond proportionally. A five-person marketing agency handling email lists has different obligations than a forty-person