IT Consulting in Scottsdale, AZ
Some Scottsdale decisions need an engineer's opinion before anyone signs a purchase order: whether the closet server should move to Azure, what a new Airpark suite needs on day one, or how to answer the security section of an SEC examination request. NetSys consults on those questions remotely and writes down the answer with costs attached.
The short answer
NetSys provides IT consulting in Scottsdale, Arizona: written assessments of your current systems, technology roadmaps with budget lines, Microsoft 365, SharePoint and Azure migrations, network designs for new or relocated offices, and security and compliance programs for advisers, practices and defense suppliers. Each engagement is scoped and quoted after discovery, with milestones, acceptance checks and a handover. The work is delivered remotely from our Brooklyn office; NetSys does not send consultants on site in Scottsdale, and hardware for a project ships configured. A virtual CIO can stay on for quarterly reviews.
Service information by The NetSys Group. Our editorial standards.
Nearby area pages: IT consulting in Phoenix · Managed IT in Tempe · Managed IT across Arizona.
How IT consulting is delivered in Scottsdale
Discovery happens over Teams and through software agents rather than a walk-through. We interview whoever runs IT today and the people who depend on it most, install NinjaOne on every computer for a hardware and software inventory, and read the configuration of your Microsoft 365 tenant, firewall and backups directly. NetSys does not send consultants on site in Scottsdale, so photos of the server closet and the network rack, taken by someone in the office, fill in what the tools cannot see. Changes are made in windows you approve, usually evenings or weekends. Equipment for a project, from a firewall to a set of laptops, ships configured, and a cabling contractor of your choosing handles any physical installation while our engineer works with them by phone. 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.
Assessments that end in a priced roadmap
An assessment is only useful if it ends in decisions. Ours produces a written report in three parts. First, what you have, with age, warranty and support status for every device and server. Second, what is at risk, ranked by likelihood and cost, from missing multifactor sign-in to a backup that has never been restored. Third, what to do about it over the next one to three years, with a budget line for each item. Two dates shape most roadmaps right now. Windows 10 support ended on October 14, 2025, so any PC still running it is a finding, and Windows Server 2016 extended support ends on January 12, 2027, which puts many small-office servers on a deadline. The report is written by the engineer who would carry out the work, so the estimates hold up.
Getting the server out of a Scottsdale closet
Summer is the argument for moving servers out of small offices. Phoenix logged 31 straight days at or above 110 degrees in July 2023, and a server closet that shares an air handler with the rest of a suite is the first thing to fail when a building's cooling struggles. A migration project starts with an inventory of what the server actually does: file shares, a line-of-business database, printing, sign-in. Files usually move to SharePoint and OneDrive with permissions rebuilt by team or client. Applications that need a server go to Azure, sized from measured usage rather than guesses, or to the vendor's hosted version if one exists. Identity moves to Entra ID so laptops no longer depend on a box in the office. Our published on-premises-to-Azure case study, which is not a Scottsdale engagement, shows the order of work.
New suites, moves and expansions in the Airpark and Kierland
Office moves are common in north Scottsdale, where the Airpark alone holds more than 25 corporate headquarters and over 2,500 smaller firms that change space as they grow. The IT side of a move has a long lead time, and it starts with the circuit: a new fiber line from Spectrum Business, Lumen or AT&T Fiber can take weeks to install, so we check what each carrier already has in the building and order early. Then come the cabling specification for your contractor, a Wi-Fi plan drawn from the floor plan, a firewall and switches shipped configured, Teams Phone numbers ported in a quiet window and a cutover checklist that ends with every desk tested. For startups growing out of SkySong, the ASU innovation center at Scottsdale and McDowell roads, the same plan usually includes moving from personal accounts to a managed Microsoft 365 tenant.
Compliance projects for advisers, practices and defense suppliers
A consulting project often begins with a letter: an SEC examination request, a cyber insurance renewal questionnaire or a prime contractor's security clause. General Dynamics Mission Systems employs 2,475 people in Scottsdale, and suppliers to defense programs work under DFARS 252.204-7012 and NIST SP 800-171 Revision 2. CMMC Phase 2, which would have made third-party Level 2 certification a condition of award from November 10, 2026, was suspended on July 13, 2026, but Level 1 and Level 2 self-assessments and a current SPRS score still apply. For medical practices, the reference case is Banner Health: HHS settled with the Phoenix health system for $1.25 million in 2023 over a 2016 hack affecting 2.81 million people, citing among other failures the lack of an organization-wide risk analysis. We turn each requirement into a gap list, a priced remediation plan and the evidence an examiner or insurer will ask to see. This is general information, not legal advice.
IT Consulting in Scottsdale: 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 Scottsdale client.
What IT consulting costs in Scottsdale
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 RIAs & Wealth Management · 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 Scottsdale, AZ.
Also in Scottsdale: IT Support · Managed IT Services
IT Consulting elsewhere: Seattle · Denver · Las Vegas · Phoenix · Albuquerque · Salt Lake City
Related services: Azure Cloud Migration · Virtual CIO (vCIO) · Microsoft 365 Migration · IT Due Diligence Services
IT Consulting in Scottsdale: FAQs
How does IT consulting work for Scottsdale organizations?
Remotely and in stages. Discovery uses interviews over Teams, monitoring agents and direct reads of your Microsoft 365, firewall and backup settings. The deliverable, whether an assessment report, a migration plan or a network design, is reviewed with you on a call before any work starts. Implementation runs in change windows you approve, with acceptance checks at each milestone and a written handover at the end. NetSys has one office, in Brooklyn, and sends no consultants to Scottsdale; any physical installation is done by a local contractor you choose, working to our specification.
How do I choose an IT consulting firm in Scottsdale?
Ask every firm for three things in writing: a sample assessment report, a roadmap with budget lines and a migration plan with acceptance checks. Then ask who writes them. Recommendations are more reliable when the engineer who makes them also has to carry them out, and when the firm earns nothing from the hardware or software it recommends. Check that security is designed in from the start rather than sold as an add-on, and that the proposal states the scope, deliverables and price of each phase before you commit.
What does an IT assessment cost, and what do we get?
Assessments are quoted at a fixed price after a short scoping call, because the work depends on the size of the environment: the number of users, servers, sites and applications, and whether a standard such as HIPAA, Regulation S-P or NIST SP 800-171 is in scope. We do not publish prices. You receive an inventory of every device and account, a ranked list of risks, a one-to-three-year roadmap with costs and a briefing call to walk through it. The only free offer is our external penetration test, which runs remotely against an external scope we agree with you.
Should we move our Scottsdale server to Azure before Windows Server 2016 support ends?
Not automatically. Extended support for Windows Server 2016 ends on January 12, 2027, after which Microsoft stops issuing security updates for it, so the server needs a plan either way. For a small office the right answer is often to retire the server altogether: files to SharePoint, sign-in to Entra ID and the application to its vendor's cloud version. Azure makes sense when an application must run on a server you control. A newer on-premises server can still be the cheapest option when a workload is heavy and stable. The assessment compares the three with real numbers.
How is IT consulting different from managed IT services?
Consulting answers a specific question or delivers a project with an end date: an assessment, a migration, an office move, a compliance program. Managed IT is the ongoing job of running the environment every day, with the help desk, monitoring, security tools, backups and vendor calls under a monthly per-user fee. A business can start with a consulting project and decide afterward whether to keep NetSys on for management, and the roadmap from the assessment becomes the plan for that agreement. Neither requires the other, and consulting work does not include a staffed help desk.
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.