IT Consulting in Raleigh, NC
For Raleigh owners and managers facing a decision bigger than a ticket: whether to retire the server, how to pass a client's security review, what a second office needs or how much to budget next year. NetSys engineers write the assessment, price the options and then run the project, working remotely with your staff and your vendors.
The short answer
NetSys provides IT consulting in Raleigh, NC: assessments with a written report, technology roadmaps with budget lines, Microsoft 365, Azure and SharePoint migrations, network and Wi-Fi designs for new space, security programs and quarterly virtual CIO reviews. Consulting is delivered remotely from our Brooklyn office. Discovery interviews, design reviews and cutovers run over Teams and remote tools, and physical work such as cabling goes to your own contractor under our written specification. Projects are quoted after scoping, and ongoing advisory work runs month to month.
Service information by The NetSys Group. Our editorial standards.
How IT consulting is delivered in Raleigh
Consulting for a Raleigh client starts with what we can read without a site survey: the Microsoft 365 tenant, firewall configurations, a NinjaOne inventory of every device and the contracts behind each vendor. Interviews with the owner, finance and the people who use the systems run over Teams in short sessions. No NetSys engineer travels to Raleigh for a project, so anything physical is written down: cabling runs, rack layouts and access point positions go into a specification with photos and floor plans for your electrician or low-voltage contractor. Change windows are set in Eastern time, usually evenings or weekends, and every cutover has a rollback step and an acceptance check you sign off. The engineer who writes the assessment runs the work that follows, so recommendations are made by someone who will have to deliver them. Assessment, design and integration work is coordinated from Brooklyn, with meetings and change windows stated in Eastern time. The project has agreed milestones, acceptance checks and a handover. Ongoing monitoring and help desk require a separately defined managed scope.
What a Raleigh IT assessment produces
An assessment answers specific questions in writing. Who holds administrator rights, and is multifactor sign-in enforced on every one of them? Would last night's backup actually restore, and how long would it take? Which licenses are paid for and unused, which devices are past support, and which vendor contracts renew automatically next quarter? The report ranks each finding by risk and cost, then lays out a 12 to 36 month roadmap with budget lines a controller can put into next year's plan. For firms that sell to large Triangle employers, it also maps current controls against the security questionnaire those customers send, so you can see which answers are true today and which need work. Scope and price are agreed after a short scoping call, and you keep the report whether or not we do the projects.
Migrations on the January 2027 clock
Windows Server 2016 leaves extended support on January 12, 2027, and plenty of Raleigh offices still run a file server, a domain controller or an application database on it. Each workload needs its own decision. Shared folders usually move to SharePoint or Azure Files with permissions rebuilt by role. Domain sign-in moves to Entra ID, with laptops joined to the cloud and managed in Intune. Application servers go to an Azure virtual machine, the vendor's own cloud edition or a supported on-premises server, depending on what the software vendor certifies. Start early: application vendors can take months to confirm a supported path, and moving a database during tax season or a year-end close is a risk nobody needs. Windows 10, which lost support on October 14, 2025, is usually folded into the same plan.
New offices and moves in a growing Triangle
Wake County Economic Development counted 24 new and expanding companies, 1,411 announced jobs and $799 million in investment between October 2025 and September 2026, and smaller firms grow into new space just as often. Office moves in North Hills, Glenwood South, the Warehouse District or along Cary's Weston Parkway go wrong in predictable places, so a move plan covers each of them. The circuit gets ordered first, because install dates are the longest lead time; the new address should be checked for Google Fiber, AT&T Business Fiber and Spectrum Business service. Cabling is specified by drop, with labeled patch panels. Wi-Fi is designed from the floor plan, with access point counts and positions. The firewall, switches and access points ship configured, and a weekend cutover is scripted step by step so staff walk in on Monday to a working office.
Virtual CIO reviews for Raleigh firms
A virtual CIO gives a business without a technology executive someone to plan with. Each quarter we review the roadmap, what was spent against budget, the incidents and near misses, and what changed in the business: a new practice area, a second office, a large customer asking for a security review. Before a cyber insurance renewal we prepare the answers to the carrier's control questions with evidence, because an inaccurate application can create problems if you ever file a claim. When a vendor proposes a new system, we compare it against what you already own and estimate the true cost of switching. The output is a short written summary leadership can act on, with decisions, owners and dates, rather than a slide deck that sits in a folder.
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
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
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
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.
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 Raleigh client.
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.
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 · Cybersecurity
Industry pages for Raleigh: IT Support for Professional Services in Raleigh, NC
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
How does IT consulting work for Raleigh organizations?
It is remote from discovery to handover. We collect data through read-only access to your Microsoft 365 tenant, firewall and devices, interview your team over Teams, and deliver findings in writing with a walkthrough call. Projects run on agreed milestones, with change windows in Eastern time and acceptance checks at each stage. NetSys does not send consultants on site in Raleigh; physical tasks go to your own contractor using our specification. If you want help afterward, monitoring and the help desk move to a separate managed agreement, where monitoring and emergency service run 24/7 and the help desk is staffed from 4 a.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern.
How is IT consulting priced?
Assessments and projects are quoted after a scoping call, with a written price and deliverables before any work starts. The size of the environment drives most of it: the number of users, servers and sites, the amount of data to move and the compliance standard the result has to satisfy. Virtual CIO advice is a monthly figure on a month-to-month agreement. Hardware and licenses are quoted separately at the price you would pay. We do not publish a price because two Raleigh firms with the same headcount can have very different estates.
How is IT consulting different from managed IT services?
Consulting answers a question or delivers a project with a start and an end: should we move to Azure, what will the new office need, how do we pass this customer's security review, what is the real IT cost of the firm we are acquiring. Managed IT runs the environment every day, with the help desk, monitoring, patching, security and vendor management. Many clients start with an assessment and keep the managed service afterward, so consulting decisions feed straight into the roadmap. Others keep an internal IT person and bring us in only for projects.
Will you work with our line-of-business software vendor?
Yes, and most projects depend on it. Whether the system is an ERP, an EHR, a practice-management platform or a document management system, the vendor owns the application and we own the infrastructure, identity and integration around it. We schedule joint calls, confirm which versions and hosting options the vendor supports before recommending a migration path, and hold the vendor to its share of the cutover plan. That way a question never falls into the gap between the two companies, and you are not the go-between.
What should a Raleigh business do about Windows Server 2016 before January 2027?
Start with an inventory of every server and what runs on it, because the answer is different for a file share, a domain controller and an application database. Then confirm with each software vendor which platforms it supports, set a cutover date outside your busy season, and budget for licenses and any new hardware. Extended support ends January 12, 2027, after which Microsoft stops shipping security updates. A server left running past that date stays exposed to every vulnerability published afterward, with no fix coming.
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.