Managed IT Services in San Francisco
NetSys runs IT for small and mid-sized businesses in San Francisco: 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. San Francisco is served from Brooklyn, three hours behind us on Pacific time, near our Palo Alto coverage area. Monitoring, help desk and remediation run remotely around the clock from Brooklyn, with coverage hours stated in Pacific 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 San Francisco: 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 Pacific 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 San Francisco
San Francisco is served from Brooklyn, three hours behind us on Pacific time, near our Palo Alto coverage area. Monitoring, help desk and remediation run remotely around the clock from Brooklyn, with coverage hours stated in Pacific 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. Financial District towers have carrier choice, but SoMa conversions and Presidio buildings often run on one Comcast circuit, and startups arrive with a Google Workspace tenant nobody has hardened, so identity is the first job. The carriers we see most in San Francisco are Comcast Business, AT&T Business Fiber, Sonic and Monkeybrains, and the failover design starts with which of them actually reach your building.
Who managed IT in San Francisco is built for
Most of our San Francisco work sits in the Financial District, SoMa, Mission Bay, the Presidio and Oakland: venture-backed startups and professional firms on Rippling, venture and financial firms on Carta, law firms on NetDocuments, biotech companies in Mission Bay on Benchling, foundations and nonprofits on Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, and agencies on HubSpot. 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 San Francisco
Two things shape the continuity design here. First, the weather and the grid: Public Safety Power Shutoffs and the earthquake case shape the design: backups live out of region and the recovery plan assumes the building is unreachable. Second, the attacks that actually land locally are ordinary ones, and the public record shows how they go: the February 2023 ransomware attack on the City of Oakland, which forced a local emergency declaration and exposed employee data. The controls in the next section are the ones that would have changed those stories.
Managed IT Services in San Francisco: 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
A 68-person venture-backed startup or professional firm in the Presidio
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 68-person venture-backed startups and professional firms in the Presidio running Rippling on a Windows Server 2016 box in a closet, Microsoft 365 licensed by a former office manager, and a break-fix provider who bills hourly and appears once something is already down. A new lease starts in ninety days and the current provider has no plan for the move. Nobody can say who has access to what, the last backup restore was never tested, and the AT&T Business Fiber circuit is the only path to the internet.
- 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
One provider is accountable for devices, network, Microsoft 365 and security. Staff call a help desk that fixes things, the insurer gets answers with evidence behind them, and leadership sees a quarterly roadmap instead of surprise invoices. The agreement runs month to month.
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.
Compliance in San Francisco: the CCPA and what sits on top of it
If you hold personal information on a resident of California, the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the CPRA (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.100 et seq.) requires reasonable security under § 1798.81.5 for any business holding Californians' personal information, gives consumers a right to sue after a breach caused by the lack of it, and sets the breach-notification duty under § 1798.82. The CCPA's consumer-rights obligations apply to businesses above the revenue and data thresholds. Healthcare practices add HIPAA and the Confidentiality of Medical Information Act, venture-backed companies answer to investor and enterprise-customer security questionnaires, and biotech and hardware firms protect intellectual property that a breach cannot restore. 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 San Francisco
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.
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.
Read next
Industry pages: IT for Professional Services & Consulting · IT for Financial Services
Terms used on this page: Managed Service Provider (MSP) · Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) · Patch Management
Guides: the questions to ask before signing with an MSP · what managed IT costs per user in 2026
Related pages
Read the full Managed IT Services service page. See everything NetSys delivers in Palo Alto, CA.
Also in San Francisco: IT Consulting · IT Support
Managed IT Services elsewhere: Los Angeles · San Diego · Irvine · Sacramento · San Jose · New York City
Related services: Co-Managed IT · Managed IT Pricing & Scope · Switching Managed IT Providers · Outsourced IT Help Desk
Managed IT Services in San Francisco: FAQs
How much do managed IT services cost in San Francisco?
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 San Francisco?
Our office is in Brooklyn, NY. San Francisco is served from Brooklyn, three hours behind us on Pacific time, near our Palo Alto coverage area. 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 Pacific time and any travel in writing, and the agreement runs month to month.
Does the CCPA apply to a small California business?
The consumer-rights side applies above thresholds ($25 million in revenue or data on 100,000 consumers), so many small businesses are outside it. Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.81.5's reasonable-security duty and § 1798.82's breach-notification duty apply to everyone, and the private right of action after a breach is what makes them expensive to ignore.
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.