IT Consulting in the Bay Area
Bay Area companies call an IT consultant at turning points: a funding round that brings a security questionnaire, a move out of a sublease, an acquisition, or servers that have outlived their support. NetSys engineers run those assessments and projects remotely from Brooklyn, put the findings and costs in writing, and can stay on as your virtual CIO.
The short answer
NetSys provides IT consulting to Bay Area organizations: written IT and security assessments, technology roadmaps with costs, Microsoft 365, Azure and Google Workspace migrations, SOC 2 and compliance readiness, network designs for new offices and virtual CIO reviews. Every engagement is delivered remotely from our Brooklyn office, with milestones and change windows set in Pacific time; NetSys does not send consultants on site. Each assessment and project carries a fixed price once scoped, and a consulting project can end at handover or lead into a month-to-month managed agreement.
Service information by The NetSys Group. Our editorial standards.
How consulting projects are delivered in the Bay Area
Discovery is done through interviews on Teams or Zoom, read-only administrator access to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, the NinjaOne agent on a sample of devices and exports from the firewall and backup system. That covers most of what a walk-through would find, and anything it misses, such as how a server closet is cabled or what is written on a patch panel, we get from photos your office manager takes against a checklist. NetSys does not send consultants on site in the Bay Area. Project work runs in change windows agreed in Pacific time, often early morning, which suits our Eastern schedule. Each project has written milestones, an acceptance test and a handover document stored in IT Glue, and the engineer who wrote the assessment is the one who carries out the work. Assessment, design and integration work is coordinated from Brooklyn, with meetings and change windows stated in Pacific time. The project has agreed milestones, acceptance checks and a handover. Ongoing monitoring and help desk require a separately defined managed scope.
When a Bay Area company should bring in an IT consultant or vCIO
The usual triggers are specific. A first enterprise customer sends a 200-question security questionnaire. Investors in a Series B ask who owns IT risk. The company outgrows a Google Workspace setup a founder built and wants Microsoft 365 with Intune, or the reverse. A lease ends and the team is moving from a SoMa sublease to a smaller office in Oakland plus remote work. Windows Server 2016 reaches the end of extended support on January 12, 2027, and the one server still running the accounting system needs a plan. A virtual CIO gives you the senior judgment for these decisions without a full-time salary: a quarterly review of risks, projects and spending, a roadmap the board can read, and an engineer accountable for carrying it out.
SOC 2 readiness and customer security questionnaires
For a Bay Area software company, SOC 2 is often the price of the next contract. A SOC 2 report is issued by an independent CPA firm against the AICPA Trust Services Criteria, so NetSys does not certify anyone; our job is to get the environment and the evidence ready. That means identity in Entra ID with multifactor authentication and Conditional Access, device encryption and patching enforced through Intune, ThreatDown endpoint detection, logged administrator access, tested backups, Rapid7 InsightVM vulnerability scans, KnowBe4 security training with completion records, and written policies that describe what you actually do. The readiness assessment maps each control to its current state and gives you a remediation plan with costs. Once the work is done, the same evidence answers most customer questionnaires, which saves the sales team weeks.
Migrations and office moves around the Bay
Migrations are where consulting pays for itself. Typical projects include moving file shares off an aging server into SharePoint and OneDrive, consolidating two Microsoft 365 tenants after an acquisition, retiring a VPN in favor of Entra ID Conditional Access, and moving a small server workload to Azure. Each one gets an inventory, a pilot group, a cutover weekend and a rollback plan. Office moves get the same treatment: we write the cabling and Wi-Fi specification for the new space, order circuits as soon as the lease is signed because installation dates depend on the carrier and the building, and preconfigure the firewall and access points so the first Monday is uneventful. Every design we write also assumes the office could be unusable after an earthquake or a power shutoff, and keeps the business able to work from anywhere.
IT due diligence and the first 90 days after a deal
Acquisitions are common among Bay Area startups and professional firms, and IT is where surprises hide. Before closing, we review the target's Microsoft 365 or Google tenant, domain registrations, administrator accounts, licenses, backups, endpoint protection and any open security incidents, and we report the risks that should be priced into the deal. After closing, the 90-day plan covers account consolidation, a single identity provider, moving email and files into the buyer's tenant, and switching off the old systems so nobody pays for two of everything. Findings are written for the people signing the deal, with an engineering appendix for whoever runs IT afterwards.
IT Consulting in the Bay Area: 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
Large international food importer: the whole platform rebuilt in Azure
An extreme weather event knocked out power and connectivity to a food importer's building and cut a 120-person, three-warehouse business off from suppliers and clients worldwide for days. NetSys ran a two-week assessment of every workload with recovery objectives per system and a cost model comparing an on-premises refresh with Azure, designed a landing zone with hub-and-spoke networks and Entra ID Conditional Access, lifted the SQL environment to Azure SQL Managed Instance, rebuilt file shares on Azure Files, published applications through Azure Virtual Desktop, connected the warehouses by VPN, and layered Defender for Endpoint, Exchange Online Protection and immutable backups on top. The migration took ten weeks with a weekend cut-over.
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 Bay Area client.
What IT consulting costs in Bay Area
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 Life Sciences & Biotech · 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 San Francisco Bay Area.
Also in Bay Area: IT Support · Managed IT Services
IT Consulting elsewhere: New York City · New Jersey · Long Island · Manhattan · Philadelphia · Brooklyn
Related services: Azure Cloud Migration · Virtual CIO (vCIO) · Microsoft 365 Migration · IT Due Diligence Services
IT Consulting in the Bay Area: FAQs
How does IT consulting work for Bay Area organizations?
It runs remotely in three stages. Discovery uses interviews, administrator access and device data; the assessment is a written report ranking risks with costed fixes; and the projects that follow are carried out by the same engineer in change windows set in Pacific time. NetSys has one office, in Brooklyn, and does not travel to client offices in the Bay Area, so anything physical, such as new cabling, is specified by us and installed by a contractor you choose. Consulting can end at handover or continue as a monthly virtual CIO review.
How much does IT consulting cost in the Bay Area?
NetSys prices consulting by the deliverable, not by the hour. An assessment has a fixed price set by the size of the environment: users, devices, offices, servers and the cloud services in play. A migration is quoted from the inventory the assessment produces, and virtual CIO advice is a monthly figure. The things that raise a quote are predictable: a second Microsoft 365 tenant, a compliance framework such as SOC 2 or HIPAA, legacy servers with undocumented dependencies, and tight deadlines tied to a deal or a lease. Every quote is written after scoping and lists what is excluded.
Do you work with startups that run on Google Workspace and Macs?
Yes. Many Bay Area startups begin on Google Workspace with MacBooks and no device management, and that can be a sound setup once it is secured. We either harden what you have, with enforced two-step verification, managed Macs and a company password manager, or plan a move to Microsoft 365 when a customer, an investor or a compliance framework makes Intune and Entra ID the better fit. The recommendation comes in writing with the costs of both paths, so the decision stays yours.
Can NetSys be our virtual CIO?
Yes. A NetSys virtual CIO meets your leadership team every quarter, reviews security risks, projects and IT spending, keeps a rolling 12 to 18 month roadmap with costs, and answers the technology questions that come up between meetings, from whether to renew a software contract to how to answer a board member's question about ransomware. For a Bay Area company of 20 to 200 people, that stands in for the full-time IT director it may not be ready to hire, and the engineer behind it can carry out the plan.
Does IT consulting cover California's new privacy audit rules?
We handle the technical side. The California Privacy Protection Agency's regulations on cybersecurity audits and risk assessments took effect January 1, 2026, with the first audit certifications due April 1, 2028 for businesses over $100 million in revenue, April 1, 2029 for those between $50 million and $100 million, and April 1, 2030 for the remaining businesses that qualify. For a company in scope, we map the controls an auditor will test, close the gaps and keep the evidence. Whether a business is in scope is a question for counsel. This is general information, not legal advice.
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.