Managed IT Services · Remote-First · Minnesota & Beyond
Black Swan Infrastructure Group manages the servers, computers, backups, and security your business runs on — and proves it every quarter with a plain-English review of what was promised, what was done, and what comes next.
You work with the person who actually manages your systems. No ticket queue purgatory, no account-manager relay.
A one-page review every quarter: uptime, patching, backups, and a roadmap. Not promised in the contract and forgotten — delivered.
Every metric in your review says where it came from. We never claim monitoring we don't have — a small honesty that keeps the big numbers trustworthy.
This table is lifted straight from our quarterly business review. It's the same view of your environment you'll get every ninety days — because a managed-services agreement should be checkable, not just billable.
| Component | What we monitor & manage | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Servers | Health, patching, uptime, hardware alerts (disk, power, temperature), warranty and lifecycle planning — refresh roadmaps before failures force them. | Covered |
| Workstations | Patch compliance, antivirus/EDR coverage, supported-OS tracking (no one left on end-of-life Windows), and responsive help desk for your staff. | Covered |
| Backup & recovery | Daily backup verification and periodic restore tests. A backup that's never been restored is a hope, not a plan. | Covered |
| Firewall & VPN | Firmware kept current, license renewals tracked, remote-access tunnels monitored. Firewalls age silently — we don't let them. | Covered |
| Email security | SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configured and monitored on your domain, whatever platform your mail runs on — Microsoft 365 or hosted mail alike. | Covered |
| Phones & vendors | One point of contact for your carrier, internet provider, and hardware vendors. We chase them so you don't have to. | Covered |
Where a metric comes from a vendor system rather than our own monitoring tools, your review says so explicitly. Accurate reporting starts with being honest about its sources.
Most businesses are already under contract with an IT provider. That's fine — there's a path for that.
A month-to-month advisory seat on your side of the table. We audit what your current provider's contract promises against what's actually being delivered, sit in on vendor conversations, and build your exit or renewal position.
Flat monthly management of your whole environment — help desk, servers, endpoints, backup, firewall, and email security — quoted after a free on-site assessment, with the quarterly review built in.
Managed IT is easy to promise and hard to verify. These are the working standards behind every Black Swan agreement — and they're written into the quarterly review, so you can check them yourself.
Firewalls, servers, and workstations are updated on a routine cadence — not when someone remembers, and not only after an incident.
Backup jobs can fail quietly for months. We verify them daily and run periodic restore tests, and the last test date appears in your review.
The quarterly business review isn't a contract clause — it's a recurring deliverable, on your calendar, every quarter.
Every server and workstation carries a lifecycle date in our records. Refreshes are budgeted and scheduled — never an emergency quote.
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are configured on your domain so criminals can't send mail as your company — and their status is monitored, not set-and-forgotten.
Credentials, documentation, and vendor accounts belong to you, in writing. If we ever part ways, the handoff is clean — no hostage-taking.
Black Swan is a young brand built on fifteen years of enterprise infrastructure and security engineering. The practice brings datacenter standards — documentation, lifecycle planning, verified completion — to businesses that could never justify an enterprise IT budget.
Enterprise solution engineering at the world's largest hardware and virtualization vendors — designing storage, server, and hyper-converged infrastructure, and supporting one of the biggest VMware environments in the country: 10 vCenters, 500+ hosts, 20,000 virtual machines.
Years of dispatched IT field work inside regulated financial institutions, multi-site retail, and enterprise branch environments — where every job is documented and verified.
When an environment is past saving, we spec and stage a new one in parallel — server, endpoints, network, backup — and cut over on a planned weekend, not in the middle of a crisis.
We've been the entire IT department before — sole infrastructure owner for a 470-user company, interim head of infrastructure for a 25-location retailer. And the standards come from the other end of the scale: university, clinical, and government workloads where an unpatched system or an untested backup was never acceptable.
Why “Black Swan”
For centuries, Europeans used “all swans are white” as the textbook example of an obvious truth — until explorers reached Australia and found black ones. The phrase came to mean the event no one saw coming: rare, devastating, and obvious only in hindsight.
Every business has black swans waiting in its IT — the backup that was never test-restored, the firewall firmware nobody touched, the server running past its warranty. Each one looks fine every single day. Until the one day it doesn't.
We plan for the event your history says won't happen.
A short on-site visit or call: we inventory what you have, flag what's at risk, and put it in writing. No obligation, and the findings are yours to keep either way.
Remote-first management wherever your business runs, with on-site service across Minnesota — from the Twin Cities to the Arrowhead and beyond.
Jonathan Lopez, Managing Partner, is your constant point of contact — the senior engineer who assesses your environment, owns the relationship, and signs the quarterly review. You never get handed off to a call center or relayed through an account manager.
Behind that single point of contact is a scalable model. Support coverage, after-hours response, and specialist skills flex with the size and needs of the engagement, with vetted talent brought in when the work calls for it — so you get a principal's attention with a team's capacity, and never outgrow your provider.