14-Day Risk-Free Managed IT Assessment for Raleigh Businesses
Stop paying for uptime you do not get. Petronella Technology Group runs a two-week, no-commitment assessment of your endpoints, identity, backups, and security posture, then quotes a flat per-endpoint price you can actually budget. CMMC, HIPAA, and DFARS pressure all welcome.
What 2026 Raleigh Businesses Actually Get From Managed IT
A real managed IT contract is six measurable outcomes, not a tickets-per-month allotment. Here is the contract Petronella Technology Group writes for Raleigh-area clients, and the gap between this model and the break-fix invoices most local firms have been paying for the past decade.
99.9 Percent Endpoint and Network Uptime, Measured Monthly
We monitor every covered laptop, server, switch, firewall, and Wi-Fi access point 24 hours a day. Outages are detected in our SOC dashboards before your users open a ticket. You get a monthly uptime report you can hand to your board, your auditor, or your prime contractor.
Rapid First-Response, 4-Hour Resolution Target on P1
A confirmed business-blocking incident is acknowledged promptly during business hours and overnight or on weekends. Resolution targets are written into your service-level schedule, not buried in marketing copy. Misses trigger a service credit.
72-Hour Critical Patch Cadence Across Windows, macOS, and Linux
Microsoft Patch Tuesday updates land on test rings inside 24 hours and on production endpoints inside 72 hours. Out-of-band CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities get a same-day emergency window. Your endpoint hygiene score appears on every monthly report.
Quarterly vCISO Advisory and Risk Register Review
Every covered company gets a 90-minute quarterly executive session with a Petronella vCISO. We walk the risk register, the compliance evidence binder, the prior-quarter incidents, and the next-quarter roadmap. No upsell pitch attached.
CMMC, HIPAA, and SOC 2 Evidence Built In
Every workflow we run, from MFA enforcement to audit-log retention to incident-response tabletop drills, maps to NIST 800-171, HIPAA Security Rule, and SOC 2 Common Criteria. Audit prep becomes a 30-day project instead of a 90-day fire drill.
Endpoint Detection, Identity, Backup, and 24/7 SOC Included
The security stack is in the per-endpoint price, not a separate line item that doubles after onboarding. You get EDR, MFA-enforced identity, immutable offsite backup, DNS filtering, email security, and 24/7 SOC triage from a single contract owner.
What you are paying for now
- Hourly invoices that scale with every fire
- No SLA, no uptime promise, no service credits
- Patches whenever the senior tech has a slot
- Backups assumed to work until they do not
- Security stack pieced together by quarter
- Compliance evidence reconstructed mid-audit
What the assessment quote replaces it with
- Flat per-endpoint price, predictable monthly
- Written SLA with response and resolution targets
- 72-hour critical patch cadence, reported monthly
- Daily immutable backup, quarterly restore tests
- EDR, MFA, DNS, email security, 24/7 SOC included
- NIST 800-171 and HIPAA evidence maintained always
The Petronella Managed IT Stack
Seven operational layers that show up on every Raleigh client contract. The same stack runs at a six-person law firm in North Hills and at a 140-person defense subcontractor in Research Triangle Park. The price scales with endpoints, not with the layer count.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
Behavior-based endpoint protection on every covered Windows, macOS, and Linux device. Threat hunting and rollback are handled by our SOC, not punted back to you as a ticket. Quarantine and isolation decisions happen in minutes, not after the workday ends.
Identity, MFA, and Conditional Access
Microsoft Entra ID or Google Workspace identity hardened with phishing-resistant MFA, conditional access by location and device posture, and quarterly access reviews. Joiner, mover, and leaver workflows run from a single ticket, not a checklist passed across three people.
Patch and Vulnerability Management
Automated patch deployment on tested rings, with Microsoft, Apple, Linux, and third-party application coverage. Vulnerability scans run weekly against external and internal surfaces, with remediation handled by our team rather than appended to your roadmap.
Immutable Backup and Disaster Recovery
Daily encrypted backups to immutable cloud storage with on-prem cache for instant restores. Quarterly restore drills validate recovery time and recovery point objectives so your DR plan is not a PDF that has never been tested.
24/7 Security Operations Center (SOC)
A hybrid AI plus human SOC monitors EDR alerts, identity anomalies, DNS exfiltration, and email-borne phishing around the clock. Tier 1 triage is accelerated by a private large language model running on Petronella-owned GPU infrastructure, so your data does not leave the trust boundary.
Email Security, DNS Filtering, and Phishing Defense
Inbound filtering against business email compromise, attachment sandboxing, lookalike-domain monitoring, and DNS-layer protection across every covered device, on-network and off. Phishing tests and remediation training run quarterly, with reportable metrics for compliance.
vCISO, Documentation, and Audit Evidence
A virtual CISO owns your policy library, your risk register, your incident-response runbook, and your CMMC, HIPAA, or SOC 2 evidence binder. Quarterly executive sessions translate the security posture into the language your board and your prime contractor actually want to read.
A note on the AI layer running inside the SOC
Most managed IT providers either ship telemetry to a third-party LLM hosted by an unnamed vendor or run no AI at all. Petronella sits between those two postures. We operate a private GPU cluster headquartered in Raleigh that runs open-weight large language models behind our SOC. The model summarizes EDR alerts, correlates identity anomalies across Microsoft Entra ID and Google Workspace, and drafts the first-pass Tier 1 ticket triage in seconds rather than minutes.
The trust boundary is the contract that matters: your alert text, your endpoint metadata, your identity signals never leave Petronella infrastructure. That posture maps directly to NIST SP 800-171 Rev 2 control 3.13.11 (employ FIPS-validated cryptography to protect the confidentiality of CUI) and to HIPAA Security Rule 164.312(e)(1) transmission security obligations. For Raleigh defense subcontractors and healthcare clients, that is the difference between an AI feature you can hand to an auditor and one you cannot.
From Per-Endpoint Pricing, Custom-Quoted After Assessment
Petronella Technology Group quotes managed IT From a per-endpoint baseline that varies with your stack depth, your compliance overlap, and your environment complexity. The 14-day assessment produces the exact number. Three illustrative tiers below help you locate yourself before the conversation.
Foundation Stack
EDR, MFA-enforced identity, patching, daily backup, 8x5 SOC triage, helpdesk, and quarterly vCISO touchpoint. Fits small professional services firms in Raleigh that need a real SLA without enterprise depth. CMMC and HIPAA evidence available as an add-on.
Regulated Stack
Everything in Essentials plus 24/7 SOC, conditional access, DNS filtering, email security with attachment sandboxing, quarterly restore drills, CMMC NIST 800-171 or HIPAA evidence binder maintained inline, and a dedicated vCISO. Most defense subcontractors and healthcare firms land here.
Hardened Stack
Everything in Compliance Track plus private LLM-backed Tier 1 SOC triage on Petronella infrastructure, SIEM and SOAR integration, CMMC Level 2 or 3 evidence pipeline, dual-region immutable backup, monthly executive risk reporting, and 24/7 phone bridge to a named engineering pod.
What the 14-Day Assessment Actually Covers
Two weeks of guided discovery, no contract, no commitment, no obligation to buy. At the end you receive a written report and a per-endpoint quote you can hand to your CFO. The deliverables below are fixed.
Days 1 to 3: External and Internal Discovery
External attack-surface scan against your public IP space, domain, email security posture (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), and exposed services. Internal network walk against your endpoints, servers, switches, firewalls, wireless access points, and identity provider. The output is a documented asset inventory you have probably not seen all on one page in years.
Days 4 to 7: Configuration Review and Compliance Mapping
Review of Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace tenant configuration, conditional access policies, MFA enrollment percentage, audit log retention, and privileged access management. CMMC NIST 800-171 Rev 2 control gap scoring across all 14 control families. HIPAA Security Rule mapping for healthcare clients. SOC 2 Common Criteria gap for SaaS clients.
Days 8 to 11: Backup, DR, and Endpoint Hygiene Validation
Verification that current backups exist, run on schedule, and actually restore. Endpoint patch posture scored against CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities. EDR coverage percentage. Local admin account inventory. Browser plugin and shadow-IT discovery. A documented gap list, ranked by exploit likelihood and business impact, gets delivered before week three.
Days 12 to 14: Findings Report and Written Quote
Executive findings briefing delivered live on Microsoft Teams or Google Meet, with the full technical report and a written per-endpoint managed IT quote attached. You leave the call knowing your three top risks, your CMMC or HIPAA gap score, your monthly cost under each of the three Petronella tiers, and the steps to remediation. If you walk away, you keep the report.
What Makes Raleigh Managed IT Different
Raleigh is not Austin, Charlotte, or Tampa, and the managed IT contract written for a Raleigh business should reflect the actual conditions on the ground. Four conditions matter, and a national MSP usually misses three of them.
RTP and Defense Subcontractor Density
Wake County alone holds hundreds of Department of Defense subcontractors and primes spread across Research Triangle Park, Raleigh proper, Cary, Apex, and Morrisville. Almost every one of them now has a flow-down CMMC clause from a higher-tier prime. A managed IT contract that ignores NIST 800-171 control families like 3.13 System Communications Protection and 3.14 System and Information Integrity is already obsolete the day it is signed.
Healthcare Overlap: Duke, UNC, WakeMed, Rex
Independent practices, specialty clinics, ambulatory surgery centers, and revenue-cycle vendors in the Triangle frequently sit downstream of Duke Health, UNC Health, WakeMed Health & Hospitals, and UNC Rex. That makes HIPAA Security Rule administrative, physical, and technical safeguards a contractual requirement rather than an aspiration. Your business associate agreements need an MSP who can actually enforce them.
Hurricane Season and Operational Continuity
Hurricane Helene in 2024 reminded every business east of Asheville that backup power and dual-region cloud failover are not theoretical. A Raleigh managed IT plan that does not include documented warm-standby failover for Microsoft 365, line-of-business applications, and key file shares is selling you a contract on calm weather.
NC State and Wake Tech Talent Pipeline
Petronella draws Tier 1 and Tier 2 engineering talent from a regional pipeline anchored by NC State University, Wake Technical Community College, and Campbell Law. That keeps our SOC and helpdesk staffed by engineers who already understand the local employer base, the regulated industries it serves, and the latency-sensitive workloads that run inside RTP carrier hotels.
A note on the national MSP pitch. The national MSPs that quote Raleigh businesses every quarter ship a generic managed IT contract written for an Austin or Atlanta market, then add a North Carolina sales rep. That is not what you are buying when you call (919) 348-4912. The Petronella managed IT contract is written from inside the Raleigh market by engineers who have run incident response in Wake, Durham, Orange, Johnston, Chatham, and Franklin Counties for over two decades. The pricing, the SLA, the response posture, and the compliance overlap all reflect that. If the assessment shows a different MSP fits you better, we will tell you that on the findings call.
Why Raleigh Businesses Choose Petronella
Twenty-four years of operating from Raleigh, with credentials that map to the regulated work the Triangle actually does.
The credential stack behind the assessment
Petronella Technology Group has been headquartered at 5540 Centerview Dr., Suite 200, Raleigh, NC 27606 since founding in 2002. Craig Petronella, founder and CEO, is the named delivery practitioner on every CMMC engagement. The full Petronella delivery team carries CMMC Registered Practitioner credentials, and the firm itself is a CMMC-AB Registered Practitioner Organization (RPO) #1449.
Frequently Asked Questions
Six questions Raleigh business owners ask before booking the 14-day assessment.
How much do managed IT services cost in Raleigh, NC?
How long does onboarding a new managed IT client take?
Do you support both Mac and Windows environments?
Can a Raleigh managed IT contract handle CMMC and HIPAA at the same time?
Do you offer pay-as-you-go or hourly managed IT?
What is explicitly not included in your managed IT contracts?
Book the 14-Day Risk-Free Assessment
Two weeks. No contract. A written quote at the end. Petronella Technology Group will tell you, on paper, what your real per-endpoint price looks like under the Compliance Track tier and whether you actually need it. Call Penny live or book online below.