IT Services and Consulting in Raleigh
NetSys provides IT consulting to businesses in Raleigh: 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. Raleigh is served from Brooklyn, in the same Eastern time zone. 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 Raleigh: 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 Raleigh
Raleigh is served from Brooklyn, in the same Eastern time zone. 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. Research Triangle Park and North Hills have carrier choice, but downtown conversions and Cary office parks often run on one Spectrum circuit, and lab buildings put instrument networks next to office networks, so segmentation comes first. The carriers we see most in Raleigh are Spectrum Business, AT&T Business Fiber and Google Fiber, and the failover design starts with which of them actually reach your building.
Who IT consulting in Raleigh is built for
Most of our Raleigh work sits in Downtown Raleigh, Research Triangle Park, North Hills, Cary and Durham: biotech and life-sciences companies on Benchling, technology and professional firms on Rippling, medical practices on Epic, research and government contractors on Deltek, law firms on Clio, and nonprofits on Bloomerang. 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 Raleigh
Two things shape the continuity design here. First, the weather and the grid: hurricane remnants and ice storms are the recurring outages, so UPS runtime and cellular failover are standard. Second, the attacks that actually land locally are ordinary ones, and the public record shows how they go: the December 2017 ransomware attack on Mecklenburg County, which the county refused to pay and rebuilt from backups, and the state's own 2021 law barring public bodies from paying ransoms. The controls in the next section are the ones that would have changed those stories.
IT Consulting in Raleigh: 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 40-person technology or professional firm in North Hills
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 40-seat technology and professional firms in North Hills that is about to sign an acquisition. A compliance deadline is nine months away and the current provider has no plan. The target runs Rippling on infrastructure nobody has inspected, the licenses and contracts are in a drawer, and the buyer needs a number for what it will cost to bring the two together before closing.
- A written security program mapped to the framework in play, with the control, the evidence and the owner listed for each requirement
- Project plan with a named engineer, acceptance checks for each phase and a cutover scheduled outside business hours
- 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
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 Raleigh: N.C. Gen. Stat. § 75-65 and what sits on top of it
If you hold personal information on a resident of North Carolina, the North Carolina Identity Theft Protection Act (N.C. Gen. Stat. § 75-65) requires notice to affected residents without unreasonable delay after a breach and notice to the Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division for every breach, regardless of size, along with reasonable protection of Social Security numbers under § 75-62. Banking and fintech firms add GLBA and regulator expectations, healthcare adds HIPAA, and the region's defense and research contractors face CMMC 2.0 and NIST SP 800-171. 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 Raleigh
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 Life Sciences & Biotech · 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 Raleigh: Managed IT Services · IT Support
IT Consulting elsewhere: Charlotte · Atlanta · Nashville · New Orleans · Charleston · Greenville
Related services: Azure Cloud Migration · Virtual CIO (vCIO) · Microsoft 365 Migration · IT Due Diligence Services
IT Consulting in Raleigh: FAQs
What does an IT consulting engagement in Raleigh 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.
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.
Do you have an office in Raleigh?
Our office is in Brooklyn, NY. Raleigh is served from Brooklyn, in the same Eastern time zone. 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.
Do we have to tell North Carolina's Attorney General about a breach?
Yes. N.C. Gen. Stat. § 75-65 requires notice to the Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division for every breach affecting North Carolina residents, whatever the size, in addition to notice to the residents themselves. The written response plan we build names who files it and when.
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.