IT Company in Houston: Consulting and Managed Services
NetSys provides IT consulting to businesses in Houston: 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. Houston 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 Houston: 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 Houston
Houston 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. Downtown and the Energy Corridor have carrier choice, but Ship Channel warehouses and strip-center practices along Westheimer often run on one circuit, and the sprawl means a technician visit is a half-day, so shipped hardware and remote management carry most of the work. The carriers we see most in Houston are AT&T Business Fiber, Comcast Business and Spectrum Business, and the failover design starts with which of them actually reach your building.
Who IT consulting in Houston is built for
Most of our Houston work sits in Downtown Houston, the Energy Corridor, the Galleria, the Texas Medical Center and The Woodlands: medical practices near the Texas Medical Center on Epic, energy-services and engineering firms on Deltek, port and logistics businesses on CargoWise, law firms on iManage, contractors on Procore, and manufacturers and fabricators on Epicor. 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 Houston
Two things shape the continuity design here. First, the weather and the grid: Harvey put water in ground-floor server rooms across the metro in 2017, the 2021 freeze took power for days, and the May 2024 derecho blew out downtown windows, so backups live out of state and failover uses cellular. Second, the attacks that actually land locally are ordinary ones, and the public record shows how they go: the August 2019 coordinated ransomware attack on 23 Texas local governments, which the state's Department of Information Resources traced to a single managed service provider's remote-management tool. The controls in the next section are the ones that would have changed those stories.
IT Consulting in Houston: 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 75-person manufacturer or fabricator in The Woodlands
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 75-person manufacturers and fabricators in The Woodlands facing a decision: the server running Epicor is seven years old, the vendor has quoted a hardware refresh, and a cloud provider has quoted the opposite. The server in the closet is seven years old and the vendor quoted a refresh nobody understands. Nobody in the business can compare the two on the same basis, the Microsoft 365 tenant is licensed on plans nobody chose deliberately, and the lease has a network-drawing clause the landlord is now enforcing.
- A handover document that says what was built, what was decided and why, so the next person does not start from zero
- Workload-by-workload cloud assessment: each on-premises system sized for Azure, priced against a hardware refresh, and sequenced by dependency
- 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
- CRM decision run with the vendor in the room: Salesforce, HubSpot and GoHighLevel compared against the sales process the team actually follows
- Datto SIRIS or Veeam backup design with immutable off-site copies and a restore test written into the acceptance criteria
- Discovery across every server, cloud tenant, device, circuit and contract, documented in IT Glue and reviewed with leadership before anything is proposed
The decision that was stuck gets made with real numbers, the project runs on a written plan with a cutover outside business hours, and the roadmap keeps the next three years of spend visible. Terms stay 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 Houston: § 521.053 and what sits on top of it
If you hold personal information on a resident of Texas, Texas Business and Commerce Code § 521.053 requires notice to affected residents within 60 days of determining a breach occurred and, when 250 or more Texans are affected, notice to the Attorney General within 30 days. The Texas Data Privacy and Security Act, in force since July 1, 2024, adds data-protection assessments and consumer rights for businesses above the small-business threshold, and Texas HB 300 tightens health-information handling beyond HIPAA. Healthcare practices carry HIPAA and HB 300, energy and industrial firms answer to customer and insurer questionnaires, and defense suppliers face CMMC 2.0. 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 Houston
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 Healthcare · IT for Professional Services & Consulting
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 Houston: Managed IT Services · IT Support · Cybersecurity
IT Consulting elsewhere: Dallas · Austin · San Antonio · Fort Worth · New York City · New Jersey
Related services: Azure Cloud Migration · Virtual CIO (vCIO) · Microsoft 365 Migration · IT Due Diligence Services
IT Consulting in Houston: FAQs
What happens after the roadmap is delivered?
Either your team runs it, we run the projects, or we take on the environment under a managed agreement. The quarterly virtual CIO review keeps the roadmap, the budget and the risk register current whichever way you choose.
How is IT consulting different from managed IT services?
Managed IT runs your environment every day: help desk, monitoring, security, backups. Consulting answers a question or delivers a project: whether to move to Azure, how to pass an audit, what a new office needs, what an acquisition target's IT will cost. Many clients use both, with consulting decisions feeding the managed roadmap.
Do you charge by the hour?
No. Assessments carry a fixed price based on the size of the environment, projects are quoted from the inventory, and virtual CIO advisory is a monthly figure. Terms run month to month, and the scope of every engagement is written down before it starts.
Do you have an office in Houston?
Our office is in Brooklyn, NY. Houston 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.
What does Texas require after a data breach?
§ 521.053 gives a business 60 days from determining a breach occurred to notify affected residents, and 250 or more affected Texans means the Attorney General must be told within 30 days. Texas HB 300 adds stricter rules for health information. Logs, encryption and a written response plan are how a small business meets the deadlines.
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.