
Our Story
Paul Rix, a Canadian entrepreneur founded Zanaris in 2015. During the early stages, the company focused on complex Cloud migrations. Paul expanded the scope into the emerging field of DevOps a few years later.
In 2019, Paul added three senior industry veterans to the Zanaris team. Chris Toushan joined as President and CEO, he was previously an SVP for SunGard Availability Services with responsibility for the Mid-West, North East US and all of Canada. Chris brought over two senior resources who had previously worked with him during his twenty-two year tenure at SunGard – Andrew Byrne, former VP of Solutions Engineering and Roger McIlmoyle, Senior Director of National Solutions Architects, one of the most senior technical resources of SunGard globally.
Together the four executives have transformed Zanaris into a unique, Managed Services Provider (MSP). Over the course of their careers, they learned that there is a gap between what the clients need from the MSP market and what those vendors are able to support.
common challenges traditional MSP experience with their customers:
“You are providing monitoring and remediation for my infrastructure, but when my server goes down, I notify you and then you begin the remediation.”
Zanaris in collaboration with our customers help design and implement the proper infrastructure to support the business availability requirements. We introduce advanced application monitoring which allows us to see degradation’s in the system and identify issues before they become outages.
“Due to regulatory issues, we cannot allow off-shore resources to have access to our data, we simply must be supported on-shore.”
Most MSP charge a hefty premium for dedicated on-shore resources. Zanaris leverages automation to eliminate operations tasks and reduce the manual intervention required to support our customers. Zanaris operations staff are 100% located in North America as part of our standard service offering. Our automation and advance monitoring tool deployment allows us to remain cost competitive without reducing labour costs through off-shoring.
“We seem to get someone new to our account every time we call in with an issue, we have to educate them on our environment before they can assist us.”
Zanaris deploys dedicated pods for each of our customers, our team has an intimate understanding of the environment. During our on-boarding process, our employees are trained and become familiar with the customer environment and people. These pods are then backed up by the entire team at Zanaris for additional support where required.


Our Vision
Zanaris leverages automation to transform and modernize the customers IT infrastructure. Zanaris is a Cloud-agnostic services provider and as a result, we provide an unbiased assessment of where workloads can be best supported.
Zanaris supports complex hybrid environments;
Regardless of the landing place that makes the most sense for our customer’s business needs, Zanaris will leverage automation to ensure the environment is properly sized and our on-going support will ensure it remains in an optimized state. Our tech stack, automation and advanced monitoring tools will support both on-prem and Cloud environments.
Our Technology
Our Tech Stack is designed to allow for our internal ticketing system to support and integrate into our customers current help desk and ticketing system without disruption.
We can deploy new automation tools or leverage existing ones. We have DevOps engineers who can support most mainstream open source automation tools;
We can support on-prem and Cloud infrastructure regardless of vendor, AWS, Azure or Google.
