IT Consulting in Austin, TX
Austin companies make expensive technology decisions under time pressure: a new lease, a funding round, an acquisition, a server reaching end of support. NetSys gives you engineers who assess what you have, write down what to change and what it costs, and then carry out the project remotely from Brooklyn, with a vCIO who stays for the quarterly reviews.
The short answer
NetSys provides IT consulting in Austin: written assessments, technology roadmaps with costs, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and Azure migrations, server retirements, network designs for new offices, security and compliance programs, IT due diligence and virtual CIO reviews. Projects run remotely from our Brooklyn office with agreed milestones, change windows in Central time, acceptance checks and a written handover, and NetSys does not send consultants on site in Austin. Assessments and projects are fixed quotes written after discovery, vCIO advice is a monthly figure, and ongoing support after a project is a separate managed agreement.
Service information by The NetSys Group. Our editorial standards.
How IT consulting is delivered in Austin
Consulting work for Austin organizations runs on video calls, shared documents and remote access to the systems in scope. Discovery starts with interviews of the people who own each system, followed by read-only access to the tenant, the firewall and the servers, so findings come from configuration rather than memory. Design reviews happen on screen with your team, and change windows are booked in Central time, usually evenings or weekends. NetSys does not send consultants to Austin. Where a project needs physical work, such as racking a new firewall or running cable in a new suite, we write the specification and the cutover checklist, your contractor does the install, and our engineer verifies each step remotely before signing off. Assessment, design and integration work is coordinated from Brooklyn, with meetings and change windows stated in Central time. The project has agreed milestones, acceptance checks and a handover. Ongoing monitoring and help desk require a separately defined managed scope.
Retiring Windows Server 2016 before January 2027
Plenty of Austin offices still have one server in a closet doing four jobs: file shares, a domain controller, a line-of-business database and print services. Windows Server 2016 leaves extended support on January 12, 2027, and Windows 10 already lost support on October 14, 2025, so the real question is where each job goes. The consulting answer is a plan per workload. Files usually move to SharePoint and OneDrive with permissions rebuilt by team. Identity moves to Entra ID, with devices joined through Intune. The database moves to the vendor's hosted version, to an Azure virtual machine, or onto supported hardware if latency or licensing requires it. Each option comes with a cost, a risk rating and a rollback plan, and the cutover is scheduled so nobody loses a working day.
New leases and office moves in Austin
Austin's office market has given tenants room to negotiate: CBRE put metro office vacancy at 24.5 percent in the first quarter of 2026, and a sublease suite can come with cabling and network closets left behind by the previous tenant. Before you sign, a consulting review checks what the space really offers: which carriers can deliver service to the address and how long installation takes, whether the existing cabling is worth keeping, where the closet sits and whether it has power and cooling, and what the landlord allows. Google Fiber, AT&T Business Fiber, Spectrum Business and Astound Business are the carriers to compare. We then write the network design, the equipment list and the move-weekend plan, and your movers and cabling contractor work from those documents while we bring each system up remotely.
From startup tooling to an audited environment
A company that raised its first round on a Google Workspace tenant, personal Apple IDs and a shared admin password eventually meets a customer, investor or acquirer who asks for evidence. Consulting turns that moment into a project with an end date. We assess identity, devices, logging, backups and vendor access against what the buyer or auditor will test, then decide with you whether to harden Google Workspace or move to Microsoft 365, based on the apps your teams use and the security features each license tier includes. For SOC 2, we build the IT controls and the evidence trail the independent CPA firm will examine. For an acquisition, IT due diligence inventories the target's accounts, licenses, contracts, backups and security posture and reports the risks that need a price before closing.
Selling technology to Texas state agencies
Austin is the seat of state government, and agencies buy technology under rules of their own. A cloud service sold to a state agency, public university or community college must hold TX-RAMP certification from the Department of Information Resources: Level 1 for public information or low-impact systems, Level 2 for confidential or regulated data in moderate or high impact systems. Provisional status lets an agency use a product for up to 18 months while full certification is completed, and a StateRAMP or FedRAMP authorization at the matching level can satisfy the requirement. For a vendor in that position, consulting means a gap assessment against the control set, a remediation plan with owners and dates, and documentation an assessor can follow. Contractors whose people touch agency systems also need DIR-certified cybersecurity training each contract term, which we track alongside the technical work.
IT Consulting in Austin: what NetSys delivers
Assessment and roadmap
- A written assessment of every system, account, vendor and risk, produced from discovery rather than a questionnaire
- A 12-to-36-month technology roadmap with costs, sequencing and the decisions that depend on each other
Projects, designed and run
- Microsoft 365 and Azure migrations planned around identity first, with Entra ID, Conditional Access and Intune designed before data moves
- Network and office designs: Cisco Meraki or Fortinet firewalls, segmentation, Wi-Fi and failover, specified before the fit-out starts
Ongoing advisory
- Virtual CIO service: a quarterly review with leadership covering risk, spend, projects and what changed
- IT due diligence for acquisitions, leases and vendor decisions, with findings in writing
On-prem servers to Azure and OneDrive to SharePoint
Two migrations in one engagement. The client's servers lived in the office, so the business lived with the office's power, cooling and hardware age, and years of files sat in individual OneDrive accounts shared ad hoc. NetSys assessed and sized each workload and moved it into Azure with identity anchored in Entra ID, designed a SharePoint structure of sites by function and permissions by role before moving a single file, migrated the OneDrive estate into it, set backups for both platforms and took on day-to-day management. The write-up is limited to the scope delivered, with no outcome figures claimed.
IT consulting work for other clients
- Real estate
Commercial property management company
SharePoint migration of 800 GB of leases, vendor records, and property documents, with separate access permissions for 12 property teams.
SharePoint & OneDrive MigrationIT for Real Estate and Property Management
Client names are withheld. These examples were chosen for the work involved, not for where the client is, so none is presented as a Austin client.
What IT consulting costs in Austin
Consulting is priced by the project or by the review rather than by the hour: an assessment has a fixed price based on the size of the environment, a migration is quoted from the workload inventory, and virtual CIO advisory is a monthly figure that scales with how many reviews and decisions a year you need. What moves the number is the number of systems and sites, the compliance standard in play and whether we are also managing the environment afterwards. Every quote is written from discovery, and the terms run month to month.
Who this fits, and who it does not
Best fit: 10 to 150 employees, a decision on the table that involves cloud, an office move, an acquisition, a compliance program or a system nobody trusts, and leadership that wants options with numbers rather than a sales deck.
Read next
Industry pages: IT for Professional Services & Consulting · IT for Startups
Terms used on this page: Virtual CIO (vCIO) · Microsoft Entra ID · Zero Trust
Guides: the cloud migration questions owners ask most · Google Workspace versus Microsoft 365 for a small business
Related pages
Read the full IT Consulting service page. See everything NetSys delivers in Austin, TX.
Also in Austin: Managed IT Services · IT Support · Cybersecurity
Industry pages for Austin: Logistics IT Support in Austin, TX · Manufacturing IT Support in Austin, TX · IT Support for Professional Services in Austin, TX
IT Consulting elsewhere: Houston · Dallas · San Antonio · Fort Worth · Texas · New York City
Related services: Azure Cloud Migration · Virtual CIO (vCIO) · Microsoft 365 Migration · IT Due Diligence Services
IT Consulting in Austin: FAQs
How does IT consulting work for Austin organizations?
Each engagement starts with a discovery call and a written scope that lists the systems, deliverables, milestones and price. Interviews, configuration reviews and design sessions happen remotely, with meetings and change windows set in Central time. The engineer who writes the assessment is the one who runs the project, so recommendations come with an implementation plan rather than a slide deck. Acceptance checks close each milestone, and a handover document records every change. A consulting project does not include day-to-day help desk support; that is a separate managed agreement if you want it.
What does IT consulting in Austin cost?
Consulting is priced by the deliverable, not the hour. An assessment has a fixed price based on the size of the environment, a migration is quoted from the workload inventory, and vCIO advice is a monthly figure covering quarterly roadmap reviews, budget planning and vendor decisions. The number of systems, sites and users, the compliance standard in play, and how much of the work your own team will take on move each quote. Quotes are written after discovery, and advisory work carries no retainer or long-term commitment.
How do we choose an IT consulting firm in Austin?
Look for a firm that puts its findings in writing, ranks them by risk, prices the fixes and can carry out the work itself. Ask how it stays neutral when it also resells hardware or licenses, how security is designed into each project rather than bolted on afterward, and what the handover includes when the project ends. Ask to see a sample assessment before you sign. NetSys has done this work since 1998, its engineers hold Cisco and Microsoft certifications, and it works with Austin companies remotely from Brooklyn.
What does a vCIO do for an Austin company?
A virtual CIO owns the technology plan without joining your payroll. Each quarter the vCIO reviews what changed, the state of security, upcoming renewals and hardware due for replacement, and updates a 12-to-24-month roadmap with costs. Between reviews, they are the person you call before signing a software contract, opening another office or answering a board question about cyber risk. For an Austin company in growth mode, the most useful output is usually the budget: what IT will cost per new hire, and which projects must land before the next funding round or audit.
Can you write a continuity plan for Texas power outages and ice storms?
Yes. A continuity engagement starts with the processes your business cannot pause, then traces each one to the systems, people and vendors it depends on. For Austin, the scenarios we test on paper are a multi-day grid failure like February 2021, an ice storm that keeps staff home for a week, and a flood that closes roads. The plan sets recovery priorities, moves what it can to cloud services hosted outside Texas, specifies UPS runtime and cellular failover for what stays local, and assigns who makes which call. A tabletop exercise with your leadership team then tests it.
Bring the decision you are stuck on.
A cloud move, a merger, a compliance deadline, a system nobody trusts. Tell us what you run and what has to change, and an engineer comes back with an assessment, options with real numbers and the order to do them in.