IT Services and Consulting in Chicago
NetSys provides IT consulting to businesses in Chicago: written assessments, roadmaps with real numbers, cloud and Microsoft 365 migrations, network designs, compliance programs and a virtual CIO who stays for the quarterly review. Engineers since 1998, not a sales deck. Chicago is served from Brooklyn, one hour behind us on Central time. Monitoring, help desk and remediation run remotely around the clock from Brooklyn, with coverage hours stated in Central time in the proposal. On-site commitments are arranged in advance and sized to the engagement. Most clients run between 10 and 75 seats, and every agreement is month to month.
The short answer
NetSys provides IT consulting to businesses in Chicago: assessments, technology roadmaps with costs, Microsoft 365 and Azure migrations, network and office designs, security and compliance programs and virtual CIO reviews. Delivery is remote-first from Brooklyn, with coverage hours stated in Central time, and on-site commitments are arranged in advance and sized to the engagement, up to a dedicated engineer with a drive time generally under an hour where regular presence is part of the scope. Most clients run between 10 and 75 seats, and every agreement is month to month.
How IT consulting is delivered in Chicago
Chicago is served from Brooklyn, one hour behind us on Central time. Monitoring, help desk and remediation run remotely around the clock from Brooklyn, with coverage hours stated in Central time in the proposal. On-site commitments outside the tri-state area are arranged in advance and sized to the engagement: a mostly remote engagement needs no dedicated on-site engineer, while an engagement that calls for regular presence, such as vCISO work with someone on site two days a week, gets a dedicated engineer whose drive time is generally under an hour, depending on where that engineer and your office are. Hardware ships pre-configured, so most projects need no visit at all. The buildings decide a lot of the design. Loop and River North towers have carrier choice, but West Loop conversions and suburban office parks often run on one Comcast circuit, and the city's biometric timeclocks bring BIPA into scope, so the inventory on the first visit covers more than computers. The carriers we see most in Chicago are Comcast Business, AT&T Business Fiber and Crown Castle fiber, and the failover design starts with which of them actually reach your building.
Who IT consulting in Chicago is built for
Most of our Chicago work sits in the Loop, River North, the West Loop, Schaumburg and Naperville: trading and financial firms on Bloomberg Terminal, law firms on iManage, medical practices on Epic, manufacturers on Plex, logistics and freight firms on Descartes, and consulting and professional firms on Deltek. Each carries its own compliance load, which the section below covers, and each has a line-of-business vendor we coordinate with rather than work around. Companies with an internal IT person fit too; in that case we supply the monitoring, the security stack and the after-hours coverage behind them, and they keep their projects.
What tends to go wrong in Chicago
Two things shape the continuity design here. First, the weather and the grid: winter storms and summer derecho power outages are the recurring risk, so UPS runtime, cellular failover and off-site backups are standard. Second, the attacks that actually land locally are ordinary ones, and the public record shows how they go: the January 2024 ransomware attack on Lurie Children's Hospital, which took clinical systems offline for weeks and was later claimed by the Rhysida group. The controls in the next section are the ones that would have changed those stories.
IT Consulting in Chicago: what NetSys delivers
Know what you have
- Discovery across every server, cloud tenant, device, circuit and contract, written up in IT Glue so it stays current
- Risk register with the ten findings that matter most, each with a fix, an owner and a cost
- Licensing audit of Microsoft 365, line-of-business software and security tools, with money found in seats nobody uses
- Rapid7 InsightVM scan of the internal and external footprint so the roadmap starts from measured exposure
Decide and build
- Cloud strategy with real numbers: keep, refresh or migrate, for each workload, with Azure and Microsoft 365 sized from your data
- Microsoft 365 architecture: Entra ID, Conditional Access, Intune, SharePoint information design and Exchange Online, in that order
- Office moves and build-outs specified from the floor plan: cabling, Cisco Meraki networking, Wi-Fi, failover and building access
- Security programs designed to the framework you are measured against, with the evidence an auditor or insurer will ask for
Keep it honest
- Virtual CIO reviews each quarter, with a written roadmap, a budget and a list of what changed
- Vendor management for the decisions that involve a CRM, ERP, EHR or practice-management vendor
- Due diligence for acquisitions and leases, so surprises show up in the report rather than after closing
- Month-to-month terms, with consulting priced by the project or by the review rather than by the hour
A 60-person consulting or professional firm in the West Loop
The specific engagements behind this profile are under NDA, so it is written as a generalization rather than a named client. Our published, client-approved outcomes are in case studies.
A consulting or professional firm in the West Loop with 60 staff, two offices on two different systems, and a leadership team that wants one. The business is moving to a new floor and the landlord needs a network drawing next week. Deltek lives on one side, the other side runs on spreadsheets, and the identity, file and email layers were never designed to be shared. A compliance questionnaire arrived in the middle of it.
- Cisco Meraki network design for the new floor: firewall, switching, Wi-Fi, segmentation and a cellular failover circuit, drawn for the landlord and the cabling contractor
- A written security program mapped to the framework in play, with the control, the evidence and the owner listed for each requirement
- IT due diligence on the acquisition target: accounts, licenses, contracts, backups and the three risks that need a price before closing
- Datto SIRIS or Veeam backup design with immutable off-site copies and a restore test written into the acceptance criteria
- A handover document that says what was built, what was decided and why, so the next person does not start from zero
- Rapid7 InsightVM scan of the external and internal footprint, so the roadmap starts from measured exposure rather than assumptions
Leadership gets a written assessment, a roadmap with costs and the order to do things in, and an engineer who stays on for the quarterly reviews. Decisions stop being made from vendor quotes. Consulting is priced by the project, and ongoing advisory runs month to month.
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.
Compliance in Chicago: PIPA and what sits on top of it
If you hold personal information on a resident of Illinois, the Illinois Personal Information Protection Act (815 ILCS 530) requires reasonable security measures and notice to affected residents in the most expedient time possible after a breach, with notice to the Attorney General when more than 500 residents are affected. The Biometric Information Privacy Act (740 ILCS 14) separately governs fingerprint and facial timeclocks and door systems, and it carries a private right of action that has produced some of the largest privacy settlements in the country. Healthcare adds HIPAA, financial and trading firms add SEC, FINRA and CFTC expectations, and manufacturers face customer audits. Consulting engagements map each requirement to a control, an owner and the evidence an auditor or insurer will ask for, before anything is bought. Most firms we take over have none of it documented, which is the part that matters if you ever have to demonstrate compliance, so the documentation is built during onboarding rather than sold as a separate project.
What IT consulting costs in Chicago
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.
Not a fit: businesses looking for staff augmentation by the hour, or projects where the outcome has already been decided and only a signature is wanted. We consult to reach the right answer, which sometimes means telling you not to buy something.
Read next
Industry pages: IT for Financial Services · IT for Legal
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 all locations and service areas.
Also in Chicago: Managed IT Services · Cybersecurity · IT Support
IT Consulting elsewhere: St Louis · Cleveland · Cincinnati · Indianapolis · Milwaukee · Minneapolis
Related services: Azure Cloud Migration · Virtual CIO (vCIO) · Microsoft 365 Migration · IT Due Diligence Services
IT Consulting in Chicago: FAQs
Can you do IT due diligence on a company we are buying?
Yes. We inventory the target's accounts, licenses, contracts, backups and security posture, and report the three risks that need a price before closing. Findings are in writing and the review is scoped to the transaction timetable.
What does an IT consulting engagement in Chicago look like?
It starts with discovery of every system, account, vendor and risk, produces a written assessment and roadmap with costs, and then either ends there or continues into the projects the roadmap calls for and a quarterly virtual CIO review. You get findings in writing at every stage, and the engineer who did the assessment runs the projects.
Can you help us choose between Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace?
Yes, and the answer depends on the applications your team actually uses, the security controls you need and whether you can mix license tiers. We run the three-task trial described in our comparison guide, price both on the same basis and write up a recommendation with the migration effort included.
Do you have an office in Chicago?
Our office is in Brooklyn, NY. Chicago is served from Brooklyn, one hour behind us on Central time. Outside the tri-state area the on-site arrangement is agreed before the engagement starts and sized to what it needs: none for a mostly remote account, and a dedicated engineer, generally within an hour's drive, where regular presence such as vCISO work with someone on site two days a week is part of the scope. The proposal states that arrangement, coverage hours in Central time and any travel in writing, and the agreement runs month to month.
Does BIPA affect an ordinary Illinois business?
If you use a fingerprint or facial-recognition timeclock or door reader, yes. The Biometric Information Privacy Act requires written consent, a retention schedule and secure handling of biometric data, and it allows individuals to sue. We inventory those systems during onboarding so nobody discovers them in a complaint.
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.