Managed IT
We become your IT department.
Day-to-day support, patching, monitoring, and planning — handled by local engineers at a flat monthly rate, so your team just works.
Built for businesses where IT failures cost real money — whether you have no internal IT at all, or a technical lead who needs real depth behind them. If you're under about ten computers, we'll point you at simpler options; past several hundred, we'll talk honestly about co-managing with internal staff.
How managed IT works
When Black Lab manages your IT, we take ownership of the whole environment — not just the tickets. Your servers, workstations, network, and cloud accounts are monitored continuously. Patches go out on a schedule, not when someone remembers. Problems get caught by monitoring before they get reported by your front desk.
And when someone on your team does need help, they reach a local engineer who already knows your environment — not a ticket queue in another time zone.
Every quarter we sit down with leadership and review what's working, what's aging out, and what's coming: hardware refresh timelines, license renewals, security posture, and a budget you can actually plan around. You'll never be surprised by your own infrastructure again.
What's included
| Included | What it means day to day |
|---|---|
| Help desk support | Your team calls or emails; a local engineer who already knows your environment picks it up. |
| Monitoring and alerting | Servers, workstations, and network gear watched continuously; failures page us, not your front desk. |
| Patch management | Operating systems and third-party applications updated on a schedule, with reporting you can read. |
| Asset and warranty tracking | Every device inventoried with age, warranty status, and replacement timeline. |
| Vendor management | We deal with your ISP, phone, printer, and software vendors so your staff never plays middleman. |
| Documentation | Your environment documented as a deliverable — passwords, configurations, diagrams — that you can inspect and that leaves with you if you ever go. |
| Quarterly business reviews | A standing meeting with leadership: what broke, what we prevented, what to budget for next. |
| Security baseline | MFA enforcement, endpoint protection, and email filtering are part of managed — not an upsell. |
How response works
Typically inside 15 minutes for a ticket, and under 5 minutes for a critical incident. After hours, monitoring alerts an on-call engineer directly and automated response begins immediately. Those are typical times rather than the contractual minimum. Your agreement sets the service levels we are formally held to; in practice we run well inside them. We report actuals at every quarterly review — measured, not marketed.
| Priority | What qualifies | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| P1 — Business down | Company-wide outage, server down, suspected security incident | All-hands response ahead of everything else, immediately escalated |
| P2 — Person down | Someone can't work: dead machine, locked account, no email | Front of the queue, worked until resolved |
| P3 — Degraded | Something is slow, flaky, or affecting a few people | Scheduled same-cycle and tracked to root cause |
| P4 — Request | New hire setup, software install, how-do-I questions | Scheduled with you, done when promised |
What's not included
A flat fee only stays honest if the boundary is explicit. Three things sit outside it:
| Hardware and software purchases | We spec and source at cost transparency, but the hardware invoice is yours — we don't mark up boxes. |
|---|---|
| Major projects | Migrations, office moves, new-site buildouts are scoped and priced separately, in writing, before work starts. No project ever appears on a monthly invoice unannounced. |
| Application development | We manage the platforms your software runs on; we don't write custom software. |
How pricing works
One flat monthly rate, set by how many people and devices we cover and which services apply — agreed in writing before anything starts. The rate covers everything in the included table above, without per-ticket charges. Our ongoing support agreements run for a year and renew automatically, and either side can end one at any time on 90 days' written notice. That is why the term is not a lock-in: the 90 days is the only commitment that binds you, and it is the same commitment we make to you. Offboarding an information system properly takes about that long, and a faster exit is where clients get hurt — credentials half-moved, systems half-documented, and nobody owning the gap. Project work is different. A project runs to an agreed schedule, and both sides are held to it — dates, deliverables, and what happens if either of us needs to stop are settled in the statement of work before any work starts.
We don't publish a number because the honest number depends on your environment: how many servers, what compliance obligations, whether we're working alone or alongside internal staff. The assessment produces a firm, itemized quote — and if the honest answer is that you don't need us yet, the quote will say that too.
The quote states any monthly minimum alongside the rate, so you see it up front rather than discovering it later. It is a floor, not a volume commitment: your rate still moves with your device count, and the minimum is what keeps the notice period honest in both directions, since an agreement priced purely per device could be emptied instead of ended. Smaller environments carry no minimum at all. It is set once at the start and doesn’t climb — and if your company genuinely gets smaller, a closed location or fewer people, we write a new agreement at the new size rather than hold you to the old one. You can still leave whenever you like on the notice above.
Onboarding in four steps
Switching runs alongside your current arrangement — there is no coverage gap.
Assessment and inventory
We document your environment — devices, accounts, licenses, credentials — while your current arrangement keeps running.
Monitoring and cutover
Agents deploy, monitoring goes live, and documentation moves into a system you can inspect.
Your team meets ours
Everyone learns the one number to call, and the first tickets get handled with the safety net doubled.
First quarterly review
Leadership sees what we found, what we fixed, and the roadmap — with a budget attached.
Fair questions
Do you replace our internal IT person?
Usually we work alongside them: they keep the floor and the tribal knowledge, we take monitoring, security, after-hours coverage, and project depth. Co-managed arrangements are priced accordingly.
What counts as "unlimited" support?
Day-to-day support of covered users and devices — tickets, calls, fixes — is covered by the flat fee with no per-incident charges. Projects (a migration, an office move) are separate, and you approve their scope in writing first. The line between the two is defined in the agreement, not discovered on an invoice.
How fast do you respond?
Typically inside 15 minutes. After hours, our monitoring pages an on-call engineer with persistent alerts — automated response starts immediately, a human typically follows inside 5 minutes, and we usually know about server problems before your team reports them. Actual response times are reported at every quarterly review.
What happens if we leave?
You give 90 days' written notice — the same notice we would give you — and we spend it handing your environment over properly rather than scrambling. You can give it at any time; you are not waiting for a renewal date or an anniversary. Offboarding an information system properly takes about that long, and a faster exit is where clients get hurt — credentials half-moved, systems half-documented, and nobody owning the gap. Offboarding is written into the agreement: your passwords, documentation, and data come back to you on departure.
See what managed IT costs for your environment.
A confidential assessment, producing a firm quote and an honest read on your current setup — whichever provider you end up choosing.