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Network Security · Manhattan

Network Security in Manhattan

NetSys provides managed network security to businesses in Manhattan: the firewall, the segmentation, the Wi-Fi, remote access and failover designed from a site survey and monitored around the clock, with equipment from Cisco Meraki and Fortinet and a configuration that is documented. Our office is at 1 Prospect Park SW in Brooklyn, so Park Slope to the Financial District is 25 minutes and to Midtown 35 to 45 by subway, which is how most Manhattan site visits happen; engineers come to you for the work that needs hands, and monitoring and help desk run remotely around the clock. Most clients run between 10 and 75 seats, and every agreement is month to month.

All IT services in Manhattan, NY

The short answer

NetSys provides network security to businesses in Manhattan: a managed Cisco Meraki or Fortinet firewall, network segmentation, secure Wi-Fi, VPN and zero-trust remote access, intrusion detection, ISP failover and 24/7 network monitoring with an engineer acting on alerts. Engineers come to you for the work that needs hands; monitoring and help desk run remotely around the clock from our Brooklyn office. Most clients run between 10 and 75 seats, and every agreement is month to month.

How network security is delivered in Manhattan

Our office is at 1 Prospect Park SW in Brooklyn, so Park Slope to the Financial District is 25 minutes and to Midtown 35 to 45 by subway, which is how most Manhattan site visits happen; engineers come to you for the work that needs hands, and monitoring and help desk run remotely around the clock. The buildings decide a lot of the design. Pre-war office buildings from the Garment District to Wall Street have one carrier in the riser more often than not, landlords control riser access and after-hours work windows, and shared-floor and co-working leases mean the network under your staff is somebody else's, which changes how endpoint security and remote access have to be built. The carriers we see most in Manhattan are Verizon Fios, Spectrum Business, Lightpath and Crown Castle fiber, and the failover design starts with which of them actually reach your building.

Who network security in Manhattan is built for

Most of our Manhattan work sits in Midtown, the Financial District, Hudson Yards, the Flatiron District and the Upper East Side: law firms on iManage, hedge funds and family offices on Bloomberg Terminal, wealth managers and RIAs on Orion, accounting firms on Thomson Reuters CS Professional Suite, agencies and media companies on HubSpot, and real estate and property managers on Yardi Voyager. 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 Manhattan

Two things shape the continuity design here. First, the weather and the grid: the outages here are a cut riser, a failed building circuit or a Con Edison vault fire, so a second carrier or wireless failover and off-site backups do more than any storm plan. Second, the attacks that actually land locally are ordinary ones, and the public record shows how they go: the June 2021 intrusion into the New York City Law Department's systems, disclosed by the city, which traced back to a single account without multifactor authentication. The controls in the next section are the ones that would have changed those stories.

What is included

Network Security in Manhattan: what NetSys delivers

Firewall and edge

Managed Cisco Meraki MX or Fortinet FortiGate firewall with rules reviewed and firmware kept current
Exposed ports and vendor port-forwards closed and replaced with authenticated, logged access
Intrusion detection and prevention at the internet edge, with geo-blocking and threat-feed filtering
ISP failover with a second carrier or a cellular backup, tested rather than assumed

Segmentation and Wi-Fi

Segments for servers, staff, finance, printers, cameras, building systems and guests on Meraki MS switching
Secure Wi-Fi with per-user authentication through Entra ID instead of a shared password
Separate guest and visitor Wi-Fi that cannot see internal systems
Port security so an unknown device cannot join the wrong network

Access and monitoring

VPN or zero-trust remote access that checks the Intune-managed device before granting entry
Encrypted site-to-site links between offices, warehouses and clinics
24/7 monitoring of firewall, switch, access point and sensor telemetry, with alerts an engineer investigates
Configuration backups and a network diagram kept current in IT Glue

Engagement profile

A 68-person law firm in Midtown on one circuit

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 law firms in Midtown occupying two non-adjacent floors connected by a cable the building's electrician ran years ago, with one Lightpath circuit serving both and iManage on a server that every device in the building can reach. One internet circuit serves both floors and it failed for most of a day during the busiest week of the year. A software vendor has a port forwarded through the firewall for support, staff work from home over a VPN with a shared password, and the conference room Wi-Fi is the network the file server sits on.

Fortinet FortiGate specified instead of Meraki where the site needs SD-WAN across several circuits
Network segmented on Meraki MS switches so the file server, the finance workstations, the printers, the cameras and the conference room Wi-Fi no longer share one broadcast domain
A second carrier or a cellular failover circuit provisioned with automatic cutover, and the failover tested with the office watching
24/7 monitoring of firewall, switch, access point and sensor telemetry, with alerts routed to an engineer who investigates
A quarterly firewall rule review put on the calendar, with unused rules removed and vendor access re-approved or revoked
Cisco Meraki MX firewall installed with intrusion prevention, geo-blocking and DNS filtering, and the vendor port-forward replaced by a logged, time-limited remote session

The next deadline week runs on a network with two paths to the internet and a vendor who gets in only when invited. A phished laptop on the guest Wi-Fi can no longer reach client files, and an engineer sees a failed circuit before the partners do. The business pays month to month.

Published case study

Large multi-divisional company: one platform, two isolated worlds

Two divisions of a 300-person health-services company had grown separate IT stacks with duplicate servers, licensing and backups. NetSys designed a single central platform with shared infrastructure at the base and strict logical separation above it: centralized servers, VPN, file storage and virtual desktops, with identity segmented by division through separate access policies, MFA everywhere and Conditional Access by role. Divisions were migrated one at a time with parallel-run weekends, and one security stack, immutable backups and 24/7 monitoring now cover both. The company reported 44% lower annual infrastructure spend after eliminating the duplicate stack.

Read the full case study (300+ employees)

Compliance in Manhattan: the SHIELD Act and what sits on top of it

If you hold personal information on a resident of New York, the New York SHIELD Act (General Business Law § 899-bb) requires any business holding private information on a New York resident, with no employee-count threshold, to keep reasonable administrative, technical and physical safeguards, and § 899-aa sets the breach-notification duty. Small businesses get a scaled standard, not an exemption. Licensed financial businesses add NYDFS Part 500 (amended in November 2023, with multifactor authentication, asset inventories and annual certification now expected of nearly every covered entity). Healthcare practices layer HIPAA on top, and advisory firms answer to the SEC and FINRA. Network security answers the access-control and monitoring parts of those rules directly: who can reach which systems, what the firewall logged, and whether payment and patient systems are isolated from everything else. 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 network security costs in Manhattan

Network security is priced as a monthly managed service per site, with hardware either included on the agreement or purchased outright. What moves the number: the number of sites and circuits, whether the site needs SD-WAN across several carriers, the count of switches and access points under management, and whether 24/7 monitoring is standalone or part of a wider managed agreement. Failover circuits are billed by the carrier at cost. We quote from a site survey, and terms run month to month. Our managed IT pricing page explains how monthly fees are built.

How the monthly fee is built

Who this fits, and who it does not

Best fit: businesses on one or two floors that inherited their network, practices that need patient or client systems isolated from waiting-room Wi-Fi, companies with an office and a warehouse or second site to connect, and any business with staff at home who need a safe way back into office systems.

Not a fit: single-person offices on a consumer router with nothing on the network but a laptop, or organizations that want equipment sold and installed without ongoing monitoring. The value is in the management and the monitoring, not the box.

Network Security in Manhattan: FAQs

Is network monitoring 24/7?

Yes. Firewall, switch, access point and sensor telemetry feed a console an engineer watches around the clock, and alerts are investigated rather than emailed. A failed circuit, a rogue device or a burst of blocked intrusion attempts becomes a ticket with a person on it.

What does network security include for a small business in Manhattan?

A managed firewall at the edge with rules and firmware maintained, segmentation so a compromised laptop or printer cannot reach the servers, secure Wi-Fi with individual credentials, remote access that checks the device, intrusion detection, ISP failover and 24/7 monitoring with an engineer acting on alerts. Equipment is Cisco Meraki or Fortinet, and the configuration is documented.

Can you connect our office to a second site safely?

Yes. Encrypted site-to-site links join the office to a warehouse, clinic or second floor, with segmentation on both ends and multifactor authentication on every remote path. Where a site has several circuits, Fortinet SD-WAN keeps traffic on the best one.

Do you have an office in Manhattan?

Our office is at 1 Prospect Park SW, Suite 6E, Brooklyn, NY 11215, and Park Slope to the Financial District is 25 minutes and to Midtown 35 to 45 by subway, which is how most Manhattan site visits happen. Engineers come to you for anything the help desk cannot fix remotely, and monitoring runs around the clock from Brooklyn. Every agreement is month to month.

Does the NY SHIELD Act apply to a small business?

Yes. It applies to any business holding private information on a New York resident, with no employee-count threshold. Small businesses get a scaled standard, meaning safeguards appropriate to their size, but not an exemption, and the breach-notification duty under § 899-aa applies to everyone.

Firewall, Wi-Fi and monitoring

Find out what your network lets through.

Discuss your firewall, segmentation, remote access and monitoring needs with an engineer. Any technical review begins with an agreed scope and access requirements.

Explore Network Security Scope 845-203-3914