IT Services and Consulting in Philadelphia
NetSys provides IT consulting to businesses in Philadelphia: 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. Center City is about two hours from Park Slope down the Turnpike, so on-site work is planned in blocks rather than dispatched same-day. Monitoring, help desk and remediation run remotely around the clock from Brooklyn. 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 Philadelphia: 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, 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 Philadelphia
Center City is about two hours from Park Slope down the Turnpike, so on-site work is planned in blocks rather than dispatched same-day. Monitoring, help desk and remediation run remotely around the clock from Brooklyn. 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. Center City's older towers share risers and often have one carrier, University City and the Navy Yard have modern fiber, and the King of Prussia and Conshohocken office parks are Comcast territory with Verizon Fios in pockets, so carrier choice is checked before any failover promise is made. The carriers we see most in Philadelphia are Comcast Business, Verizon Fios and Crown Castle fiber, and the failover design starts with which of them actually reach your building.
Who IT consulting in Philadelphia is built for
Most of our Philadelphia work sits in Center City, University City, the Navy Yard, King of Prussia and Conshohocken: medical practices and health-system affiliates on Epic, biotech and life-sciences companies on Benchling, law firms on iManage, accounting firms on Thomson Reuters CS Professional Suite, nonprofits and universities' affiliates on Blackbaud, and contractors on Procore. 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 Philadelphia
Two things shape the continuity design here. First, the weather and the grid: Ida's remnants flooded the Schuylkill and Vine Street Expressway corridor in September 2021, so ground-floor server rooms near the river are the design case for off-site backups. Second, the attacks that actually land locally are ordinary ones, and the public record shows how they go: the 2023 breach of the City of Philadelphia's email environment, disclosed by the city in October 2023, which exposed health and personal information held in mailboxes. The controls in the next section are the ones that would have changed those stories.
IT Consulting in Philadelphia: 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
- Budget modeling that compares an on-premises refresh with Microsoft 365, Azure and Azure Virtual Desktop on the same basis
- Vendor and contract review: licensing, ISP, telecom, software and support agreements, with what to cancel and what to renegotiate
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
- Security and compliance programs mapped to the standard you answer to, whether HIPAA, NYDFS Part 500, CMMC 2.0, SOC 2 or a cyber insurer's questionnaire
- Project management with a named engineer, a written plan, acceptance checks and a cutover that happens outside business hours
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
- Line-of-business application decisions coordinated with the vendor, from CRM selection (Salesforce, HubSpot, GoHighLevel) to ERP
- An engineer who knows your environment on call for the decisions that come up between reviews
A 68-person medical practice or health-system affiliate in Conshohocken
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 68-person medical practices and health-system affiliates in Conshohocken facing a decision: the server running Epic is seven years old, the vendor has quoted a hardware refresh, and a cloud provider has quoted the opposite. Two offices run on two different systems and leadership wants one. 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.
- SharePoint information architecture designed by function and role before the file migration, so permissions follow the business rather than whoever created a folder
- Licensing audit of Microsoft 365 and the security stack, with unused seats reclaimed and Business Premium compared with the tools bought separately
- CRM decision run with the vendor in the room: Salesforce, HubSpot and GoHighLevel compared against the sales process the team actually follows
- Project plan with a named engineer, acceptance checks for each phase and a cutover scheduled outside business hours
- Virtual CIO cadence set: quarterly reviews with a roadmap, a budget and a change log, starting at the 90-day mark
- 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.
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.
Compliance in Philadelphia: 73 P.S. § 2301 and what sits on top of it
If you hold personal information on a resident of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania's Breach of Personal Information Notification Act (73 P.S. § 2301 et seq., amended by Act 151 of 2022) requires notice to affected Pennsylvania residents without unreasonable delay after a breach of unencrypted personal information, and the 2022 amendment widened the definition of personal information to include medical, health-insurance and account-credential data and added a notice to the Attorney General when more than 500 residents are affected. Healthcare systems and practices add HIPAA, financial advisors add SEC and FINRA expectations, and the region's defense and aerospace 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 Philadelphia
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 Life Sciences & Biotech
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 Philadelphia.
Also in Philadelphia: Managed IT Services · Cybersecurity · IT Support
IT Consulting elsewhere: Pittsburgh · New York City · New Jersey · Long Island · Manhattan · Brooklyn
Related services: Azure Cloud Migration · Virtual CIO (vCIO) · Microsoft 365 Migration · IT Due Diligence Services
IT Consulting in Philadelphia: FAQs
Will you work with our line-of-business software vendor?
Yes. CRM, ERP, EHR and practice-management decisions are coordinated with the vendor, whether that is Salesforce, HubSpot, GoHighLevel, NetSuite, Epic or Clio. We handle the infrastructure, identity and integration side and hold the vendor to the application side, so no question falls between the two.
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 have an office in Philadelphia?
Our office is in Brooklyn, NY. Center City is about two hours from Park Slope down the Turnpike, so on-site work is planned in blocks rather than dispatched same-day. 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 and any travel in writing, and the agreement runs month to month.
What does Pennsylvania's breach notification law require of a small business?
73 P.S. § 2301 et seq. requires notice to affected residents without unreasonable delay after a breach of unencrypted personal information, which since the 2022 amendment includes medical and account-credential data. More than 500 affected residents also triggers a notice to the Attorney General. Encryption and a written response plan are the practical defenses.
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.