Joseph Colarusso has spent his career at the intersection of three worlds: law, education, and technology. Courtroom to classroom to cloud. The setting kept changing, but the throughline held - put strong systems behind people whose work matters.
Today Joe is Principal Consultant at Charter Technology Solutions (CTS), a managed IT and cybersecurity firm that has served mission-driven organizations since 2010. CTS supports more than 120 charter school and nonprofit sites and was named to Channel Partners' 2025 MSP 501 list of the top managed service providers worldwide. Joe is who school and nonprofit leaders turn to when they want technology to stop being a source of stress and start being a foundation they can build on. He owns those relationships from the first conversation about where an organization is stuck to the long-term roadmap that keeps it secure, compliant, and ready to grow.
He is also an active voice in the charter school community, speaking and writing on practical AI adoption, cybersecurity foundations, and how to scale an organization without losing its mission. His guiding belief is simple: technology should power purpose, not get in the way of it.
Joe is always glad to connect with founders, operators, and advisors who care about building institutions that work.
Charter Technology Solutions (CTS) is a managed IT and cybersecurity firm that helps organizations run on technology they can trust. CTS works as the outsourced IT and security department, or as the expert partner alongside an in-house team, handling everything from day-to-day support and network infrastructure to cybersecurity, compliance, and long-term technology strategy.
Founded in 2010, CTS was built on a straightforward idea: bring the enterprise-grade IT and security standards developed for Wall Street to organizations that had never had access to them. The firm earned its name and its reputation in K-12 education, one of the most security-sensitive, compliance-heavy, and budget-conscious environments there is. That same discipline now serves every client CTS supports, across the business, nonprofit, and education sectors alike.
Today CTS supports more than 120 client sites, maintains a client retention rate above 95 percent, and was named to the 2025 MSP 501 list of the world's top managed service providers. Its difference shows up in the details: engineers who design and build networks rather than only maintain them, a diagnose-before-prescribe approach, and security built into everything from the start.
CTS exists to make technology power an organization's mission, not stand in its way.
History, Art, Philosophy.
Video Games, Science Fiction, and AI.
Education, Politics, and Technology.
Innovation Charter High School
The best introduction you can make is to a leader of a business, nonprofit, or school that depends on technology every day but doesn't have the in-house IT muscle to match. Usually that's an organization with somewhere between 30 and several hundred people, sometimes across multiple locations, with one of these things going on:
- They're frustrated with their current IT provider, or they've been limping along on "the one person who knows the systems."
- They just had a security scare. A phishing email that worked, a ransomware threat, or a client or funder asking hard questions about how their data is protected.
- A cyber insurance application or a new contract is suddenly demanding security controls they don't have in place.
- They're opening a new office or building out a new space and need the network and systems done right the first time.
- They're growing faster than their technology can keep up with.
- Leadership is asking "are we secure?" or "how should we be thinking about AI?" and nobody can give them a straight answer.
The person to introduce me to is usually the owner, executive director, COO, CFO, or head of the organization. A warm introduction to that decision-maker is worth far more than a name and a number.
If you hear any of that in a conversation, that's my lead.