Managed IT Services · Houston

Managed IT Services in Houston

NetSys runs IT for small and mid-sized businesses in Houston: help desk, security, backups, Microsoft 365 and the network, for a flat monthly fee per user. We have run IT out of New York since 1998, and our engineers hold degrees in electrical and computer engineering. Houston is served from Brooklyn, one hour behind us on Central time. Monitoring, help desk and remediation run remotely around the clock from Brooklyn, with coverage hours stated in Central time in the proposal. 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 managed IT to businesses in Houston: help desk with engineers on the line, 24/7 monitoring, patching, ThreatDown managed detection and response, Microsoft 365 and Intune administration, tested backups and vendor management, for a flat monthly fee per user. Delivery is remote-first from Brooklyn, with coverage hours stated in Central time, 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 managed IT is delivered in Houston

Houston is served from Brooklyn, one hour behind us on Central time. Monitoring, help desk and remediation run remotely around the clock from Brooklyn, with coverage hours stated in Central time in the proposal. 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 a standing on-site day or two each 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. Downtown and the Energy Corridor have carrier choice, but Ship Channel warehouses and strip-center practices along Westheimer often run on one circuit, and the sprawl means a technician visit is a half-day, so shipped hardware and remote management carry most of the work. The carriers we see most in Houston are AT&T Business Fiber, Comcast Business and Spectrum Business, and the failover design starts with which of them actually reach your building.

Who managed IT in Houston is built for

Most of our Houston work sits in Downtown Houston, the Energy Corridor, the Galleria, the Texas Medical Center and The Woodlands: medical practices near the Texas Medical Center on Epic, energy-services and engineering firms on Deltek, port and logistics businesses on CargoWise, law firms on iManage, contractors on Procore, and manufacturers and fabricators on Epicor. 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 Houston

Two things shape the continuity design here. First, the weather and the grid: Harvey put water in ground-floor server rooms across the metro in 2017, the 2021 freeze took power for days, and the May 2024 derecho blew out downtown windows, so backups live out of state and failover uses cellular. Second, the attacks that actually land locally are ordinary ones, and the public record shows how they go: the August 2019 coordinated ransomware attack on 23 Texas local governments, which the state's Department of Information Resources traced to a single managed service provider's remote-management tool. The controls in the next section are the ones that would have changed those stories.

What is included

Managed IT Services in Houston: what NetSys delivers

Help desk and monitoring

  • Unlimited help desk by phone, email and Teams, staffed by engineers rather than a ticket queue, with severe problems such as ransomware, systems down, no internet or email not working answered immediately by your dedicated engineer
  • 24/7 monitoring of every server, workstation and firewall through NinjaOne RMM, with alerts an engineer acts on rather than forwards
  • Patching and routine maintenance on the schedule your business sets, weekly for some clients and quarterly for others, with urgent fixes applied as needed in between
  • Documentation of the whole environment in IT Glue, so the answer to 'what is that box' exists in writing

Security, built in

  • ThreatDown managed detection and response with EDR agents on every device, not just servers
  • Microsoft Defender for Business, Entra ID Conditional Access and multifactor authentication across the Microsoft 365 tenant
  • Barracuda Email Protection in front of every mailbox, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC set correctly
  • KnowBe4 security awareness training and simulated phishing for every user, on a recurring schedule

Backups, devices and vendors

  • Datto SIRIS or Veeam backups with immutable off-site copies, and live restores run on the schedule in the agreement with the result sent to you
  • Intune and Windows Autopilot device management, so a new laptop ships sealed and configures itself at first sign-in
  • Vendor management: we deal with the ISP, the line-of-business software vendor and the landlord's building IT
  • A quarterly technology review with a written roadmap and budget, run by the engineer who knows your environment
Engagement profile

A 30-person medical practice near the Texa Medical Center in the Galleria

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 30-seat medical practices near the Texas Medical Center in the Galleria that grew out of its setup: Epic plus a dozen browser tools, an Exchange Online tenant with no multifactor authentication, a Meraki firewall out of support and a Comcast Business connection with no failover. The one internal IT person gave notice and took the passwords with them. The owner has become the help desk and the office manager keeps the passwords in a spreadsheet.

  • Discovery on every device, account and vendor contract, documented in IT Glue before anything is changed
  • NinjaOne RMM agents deployed to every workstation and server for 24/7 monitoring, patching and remote support
  • Microsoft 365 tenant review: dormant accounts closed, legacy authentication switched off, Entra ID Conditional Access and multifactor authentication applied to every user
  • Datto SIRIS appliance installed for the server with immutable cloud copies, and a first restore run and dated within the first month
  • KnowBe4 onboarding for every user, with a baseline phishing test in week one and recurring training after that
  • Cisco Meraki firewall and switches configured with segmentation for servers, staff, printers and guests, and a cellular failover circuit

Day-to-day support moves to engineers with 24/7 monitoring behind them, the security stack is on every device, and the quarterly review keeps the roadmap and the budget in the same conversation. The agreement stays month to month.

Published case study

Law office: Microsoft 365 with layered security and cloud-to-cloud backup

A 25-attorney firm in the greater New York metro was losing unbillable hours to an outdated file server and an email server that needed weekly attention. NetSys mapped the firm's matters and document workflows first, moved email to Exchange Online and documents to SharePoint and OneDrive in a matter-based structure over a weekend cut-over, layered anti-phishing protection, DNS filtering, multifactor authentication and endpoint protection across attorney devices, and set independent cloud-to-cloud backup of the whole tenant. The firm reported 82% fewer IT support incidents per month within two quarters and about 3.5 hours per attorney per week recovered from IT friction.

Read the full case study (25 attorneys + staff)

Compliance in Houston: § 521.053 and what sits on top of it

If you hold personal information on a resident of Texas, Texas Business and Commerce Code § 521.053 requires notice to affected residents within 60 days of determining a breach occurred and, when 250 or more Texans are affected, notice to the Attorney General within 30 days. The Texas Data Privacy and Security Act, in force since July 1, 2024, adds data-protection assessments and consumer rights for businesses above the small-business threshold, and Texas HB 300 tightens health-information handling beyond HIPAA. Healthcare practices carry HIPAA and HB 300, energy and industrial firms answer to customer and insurer questionnaires, and defense suppliers face CMMC 2.0. The managed agreement produces the evidence those rules ask for as a by-product: access reviews, patch reports, backup test results and a written incident response plan. 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 managed IT costs in Houston

Managed IT is priced per user per month for a fully managed agreement, and the number moves with four things more than with headcount: how many servers you run, whether you need after-hours coverage beyond monitoring, how much compliance documentation you carry, and whether we are co-managing alongside an internal person or running everything. We quote from an assessment, not a phone call, and the agreement runs month to month. What belongs in the monthly fee versus what is billed separately is set out on our managed IT pricing page.

How the monthly fee is built

Who this fits, and who it does not

Best fit: 10 to 75 employees, one or two offices plus remote staff, already on Microsoft 365 or ready to move there, and either no internal IT or one person who is underwater.

Not a fit: businesses under five people, who are usually better served by the small-office baseline described in our five-person case study, or organizations over 250 seats, which need an internal team we can co-manage with rather than replace.

Common Questions

Managed IT Services in Houston: FAQs

How much do managed IT services cost in Houston?

The figure is quoted per user per month from an assessment of your environment, and it moves with server count, after-hours coverage, compliance requirements and whether you keep an internal IT person more than with headcount. Our managed IT pricing page explains what sits inside the monthly fee and what is billed separately, so quotes can be compared on the same basis.

What happens to our current provider?

We run the transition. That means collecting credentials and documentation, auditing what is actually deployed against what you are paying for, and cutting over in stages. Three to four weeks is typical for a 20-seat office, with no downtime during business hours, and the old provider's access is removed at the end.

What tools do you use to manage our systems?

NinjaOne for remote monitoring and management, IT Glue for documentation, ThreatDown for managed detection and response, Microsoft Defender for Business, Intune and Entra ID for devices and identity, Barracuda for email protection, Datto or Veeam for backups, KnowBe4 for training and Keeper for passwords. Licensing for those tools is included in the agreement rather than added on.

Do you have an office in Houston?

Our office is in Brooklyn, NY. Houston is served from Brooklyn, one hour behind us on Central time. 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 a standing on-site day or two each week is part of the scope. The proposal states that arrangement, coverage hours in Central time and any travel in writing, and the agreement runs month to month.

What does Texas require after a data breach?

§ 521.053 gives a business 60 days from determining a breach occurred to notify affected residents, and 250 or more affected Texans means the Attorney General must be told within 30 days. Texas HB 300 adds stricter rules for health information. Logs, encryption and a written response plan are how a small business meets the deadlines.

One provider, month to month

Get the whole of your IT handled by one accountable team.

Tell us how many people and devices you have, what you run today and what keeps breaking. We come back with a written scope, the responsibilities on each side and a monthly figure, before you decide anything.