IT Consulting in Salt Lake City
Salt Lake City businesses bring us questions with dates attached: a downtown lease ending, a server that loses support in January 2027, a bank partner's security questionnaire due Friday, a recovery plan that has to assume the Wasatch Fault. NetSys answers them with written assessments, costed plans and engineers who carry the projects out, all delivered remotely from Brooklyn.
The short answer
NetSys provides IT consulting to Salt Lake City organizations: fixed-price assessments, three-year technology roadmaps, migrations to Microsoft 365 and Azure, office-move network designs, disaster recovery plans and virtual CIO reviews. The work is remote, with no consultant traveling to Salt Lake City for on-site work, and design workshops run on video in Mountain time. Each project ends with acceptance tests and a handover document. Consulting is quoted per deliverable after a discovery call; if you later want us to operate what we deliver, the staffed help desk comes under a separate managed agreement.
Service information by The NetSys Group. Our editorial standards.
How IT consulting works for Salt Lake City firms
An engagement starts with a discovery call and a data request rather than a walk around the office. We install a read-only inventory agent, export the Microsoft 365 tenant settings and firewall configuration, and interview the people who use the systems daily over video. For an office move or a new suite in a downtown tower, the landlord's floor plans, photos of the telecom room and the cabling contractor's notes stand in for a walk-through, because NetSys does not travel to Salt Lake City for on-site work. Findings come back as a written report ranked by risk and cost, followed by a meeting to decide what happens first and what can wait a year. Assessment, design and integration work is coordinated from Brooklyn, with meetings and change windows stated in Mountain time. The project has agreed milestones, acceptance checks and a handover. Ongoing monitoring and help desk require a separately defined managed scope.
Planning for the Wasatch Fault after the 2020 Magna earthquake
On the morning of March 18, 2020, a magnitude 5.7 earthquake centered near Magna, about 15 miles west of downtown, emptied Salt Lake City International Airport, halted TRAX light rail and cut power to roughly 55,000 customers. It was Utah's strongest quake since 1992, and by the region's standards it was moderate. The Working Group on Utah Earthquake Probabilities puts the chance of at least one magnitude 6.75 or larger earthquake in the Wasatch Front region within 50 years at 43 percent. A consulting review asks the questions that forecast raises: which systems still live in a server closet, whether backup copies are stored outside the region, how staff work if the building is closed for weeks, and how long the business can run on laptops, Microsoft 365 and cellular hotspots.
Office moves: downtown, Sugar House, Research Park and the airport corridor
Each part of the city brings a different kind of move. Firms trade floors in Central Business District towers, small companies take converted space in Sugar House, life-sciences tenants build out in the University of Utah Research Park, home to more than forty companies and ARUP Laboratories' campus, and distributors open warehouses in the Northwest Quadrant, the roughly 16,000 acres near the airport that the Utah Inland Port Authority oversees. All of them need the same groundwork: circuits ordered early from Comcast Business, Lumen or GFiber depending on the address, a cabling and telecom-room plan, a firewall and wireless design, number porting for the phones and a scheduled cutover weekend. Warehouses add rugged access points, scanner coverage across the racks and separate network segments for cameras and dock equipment.
Azure and Microsoft 365 migrations, sized with real numbers
Many migrations end in the cloud, but not every workload should move. We size the decision with figures: data volume against your upload speed, whether the application vendor supports Azure, licensing under Microsoft 365 Business Premium or E3, and the monthly Azure bill against the cost of a smaller server. A typical sequence moves mail and files first, into Exchange Online, SharePoint and OneDrive with permissions rebuilt by department; then the line-of-business application, into Azure or the vendor's own cloud; then identity, with Entra ID replacing the old domain controller. Each stage has a pilot group, a cutover window outside your business hours and a rollback path. Our published case study moving on-premises servers to Azure and OneDrive to SharePoint shows the pattern; it was not a Salt Lake City engagement.
Security and compliance planning for Salt Lake City firms
Salt Lake City has a deep financial sector, from Zions Bancorporation's headquarters and one of Goldman Sachs's largest offices to Utah's industrial banks, which held about 93.5 percent of U.S. industrial bank assets in 2019. Smaller lenders, wealth advisers and fintech firms inherit their partners' security expectations, and the rules depend on the charter: Gramm-Leach-Bliley and the FTC Safeguards Rule for non-bank lenders, SEC Regulation S-P as amended in 2024 for advisers and broker-dealers, the HIPAA Security Rule for anyone handling patient data, and Utah Code 13-44 for everyone. A consulting engagement maps which apply, closes the gaps in a set order and writes the program so it also supports a defense under Utah's 2021 affirmative-defense statute. This is general information, not legal advice.
IT Consulting in Salt Lake City: 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 Salt Lake City client.
What IT consulting costs in Salt Lake City
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 Professional Services & Consulting · IT for Healthcare
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 Utah.
Also in Salt Lake City: Managed IT Services · IT Support
IT Consulting elsewhere: Seattle · Denver · Las Vegas · Phoenix · Albuquerque · Portland
Related services: Azure Cloud Migration · Virtual CIO (vCIO) · Microsoft 365 Migration · IT Due Diligence Services
IT Consulting in Salt Lake City: FAQs
How does IT consulting work for Salt Lake City organizations?
From Brooklyn, over the network and on video. We gather data with a read-only agent and configuration exports, interview staff in scheduled calls, hold design reviews in Mountain time and make approved changes over secure remote sessions, usually in early-morning or weekend windows. Your staff or contractor handles anything physical, like mounting a firewall, with an engineer talking them through it; NetSys does not send people to Salt Lake City. Projects have a fixed scope before they start, and advisory work runs month to month.
When do we need IT consulting rather than managed IT?
Managed IT is the daily operation: the help desk, monitoring, patching, security tools and backups, billed monthly with no end date. Consulting is bounded work with a finish line, such as deciding whether a workload belongs in Azure, specifying the network for a new suite in the Granary District, getting through a bank partner's vendor review or pricing the IT cleanup after an acquisition. Some companies start with a consulting project, then either run the result themselves or hand it to us under a managed agreement; the roadmap carries over either way.
What does IT consulting cost in Salt Lake City?
Each deliverable is quoted on its own after a discovery call. An assessment's price is fixed in advance and scales with users, servers, locations and cloud tenants. A migration is priced from a count of mailboxes, shared folders, applications and gigabytes, and an office move from the floor plan, the carrier orders and the equipment list. Disaster recovery planning depends on how many systems need recovery targets and whether you want a tested failover. Virtual CIO reviews are a monthly figure on month-to-month terms.
Can you build a disaster recovery plan that assumes a major earthquake?
Yes, and the working assumption should be that the building is unusable and power, roads and phone networks in the valley are disrupted for days. The plan moves critical systems out of the office into Microsoft 365, Azure or the vendor's cloud, keeps immutable backup copies in a data center outside Utah, and writes down who does what when staff cannot reach the office: which laptops, which hotspots, where the main number forwards. We test restores and run a tabletop exercise so the plan has been tried before it is needed. Across the ransomware cases NetSys has handled, every client that already had a recovery plan was working again within a day.
Can you help with security reviews from enterprise customers and bank partners?
Yes. Software firms, lenders and service companies are regularly asked to complete vendor security questionnaires, and some need a SOC 2 report. A consulting engagement gathers the evidence those reviews ask for (multifactor sign-in coverage, device encryption, endpoint detection, patch timelines, backup tests, access reviews, the incident response plan) and writes answers that match what is actually deployed. Where controls are missing, we put them in first. A SOC 2 audit itself is performed by an independent CPA firm; we prepare the technical controls and the evidence trail.
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.