IT Support for New York Cannabis Dispensaries

A NY-licensed dispensary must run METRC for every transaction, log every seed-to-sale event the same business day, and keep at least 30 days of video footage available for OCM inspection. The POS must integrate with METRC in real time. Every employee account that touches METRC or the POS needs multi-factor authentication. Your IT stack also needs encrypted backups that can recover within hours and an inspection-readiness folder a regulator can review without you scrambling.

The POS is the customer-facing edge of your METRC integration. Cova, Treez, Dutchie, and Leaflogix all sync to METRC, but each handles connection drops differently. If METRC is unreachable and your POS does not have a documented offline-mode workflow, you stop selling. We design the network so the POS, the METRC API, and the state-required camera system each have independent failure paths, not one shared point of failure.

NY OCM regulations require licensees to retain video surveillance footage for a minimum of 30 days, with all entrances, points of sale, vaults, and product-handling areas covered. The footage must be available for OCM review on request. We design retention storage so 30 days is the floor, not the ceiling, and so a hardware failure does not destroy the only copy.

It depends on whether your POS has a documented offline-mode workflow that satisfies state reporting requirements after the fact. Without one, the sale cannot legally complete. With one, the sale records locally and reconciles to METRC once connectivity restores, and you keep selling. We build that workflow into the network design and the staff training, not as an afterthought when METRC goes down on a Friday afternoon.

Yes. State regulators expect role-based access control with strong authentication on every account touching regulated systems. Cyber-insurance carriers expect the same, and many will not write coverage without it. We deploy MFA via a single vendor that covers Microsoft 365, the POS, the METRC console, and the camera-system admin portal so employees authenticate once per shift instead of fighting four prompts.

13 NYCRR Part 113 is the section of New York Codes covering adult-use cannabis recordkeeping, security, and inspection requirements. It applies to the POS, the METRC integration, your video surveillance system, your inventory storage area access logs, and the employee records that prove who had what permissions when. We map each system in your IT stack to the specific subsections of Part 113 it satisfies, so when OCM asks, you have an answer.

Three things. Immutable offsite backups that ransomware cannot encrypt because they are write-once. A documented recovery sequence that prioritizes the POS and METRC link first, the camera system second, and the back-office last. And a clean recovery environment we can spin up before restoring data to it, so we do not reinfect on Day 2. We test the restore quarterly because a backup that has never been restored is a guess.

Yes, but the architecture matters. Multi-state operators need separate METRC accounts per state because each state runs its own instance, and the network design has to respect that. Multi-license operators (retail plus cultivation, for example) need separate inventory boundaries inside METRC and separate camera-system zones to satisfy each license's reporting rules. We support both, and we have built the network designs for operators running three locations in the Capital Region as well as multi-state setups stretching into MA and NJ.