Managed Infrastructure Health
Your servers should be boring.
Flat-fee preventive maintenance for businesses that depend on their servers, backups, and network, whether IT is one busy person or nobody at all. The work runs on a schedule outside your business hours, and a written report shows up every month to prove it.
Backupsverified & restore-tested
Directoryhealthy & replicating
Storage / sharescapacity reviewed
Firewall / VPNaudited
Systemspatched
Monthly reportdelivered
Prevention beats repair.
Most small businesses buy IT the same way. Nothing for months, then a bad week when a drive dies or a backup turns out to be empty. An hourly technician shows up, fixes the symptom, sends an invoice, and promises to keep an eye on things.
Nobody keeps an eye on things. Watching infrastructure is unglamorous work, and it only counts if it happens every single month. The backups have to be restored for real, the patches applied, the directory checked for drift, the firewall rules read line by line.
And the eyes doing the watching are mine. Plenty of providers install a monitoring agent, point it at a dashboard, and call that coverage. Software can page someone when a disk dies, but it won't notice that your backup window has been quietly growing for three months, or that a firewall rule from some vendor visit two years ago is still sitting open. So every month, on schedule, I sit down and go through your systems personally. That review is what you're paying for.
That work is the entire service. It isn't a helpdesk, and I'm not here to sell you hardware. You pay a fixed monthly fee so the bad week never shows up.
What's covered
Read the FAQ
Eight jobs, done on a schedule, in writing.
Backups
Backup integrity verification
A backup nobody has ever restored is a rumor. Jobs get checked and real restores get run on a schedule, so you know the copy exists and actually works.
Directory
Directory & core services
Active Directory, Group Policy, DNS, and DHCP reviewed for clean replication and stale accounts. When logins slow down or a mapped drive disappears, this layer is usually the reason, and it gets looked at before anyone has to notice.
Storage
Storage & file shares
Your business lives in its shared drives. Capacity gets tracked before it runs out, and share permissions get reviewed so a departed employee's account isn't still holding the keys to payroll.
Perimeter
Firewall & VPN audits
Firewall rules, port forwards, and remote access reviewed line by line. Stale rules get flagged, risky exposure gets closed, and every change is written down.
Patching
Server & hypervisor patching
Operating systems, hypervisors, and core services updated during scheduled windows, with a rollback plan ready before anything is touched.
Monitoring
Monitoring & disk health
Uptime checks, storage capacity, and disk health indicators reviewed every month, so a weakening drive gets replaced before it dies.
Security
Security monitoring
Intrusion detection review, DNS-level malware filtering, and a plain summary of what actually hit your network this month. The defenses get tuned against real attack data instead of sitting on vendor defaults.
Reporting
The monthly health report
A plain-English report covering what was verified, what was patched, what was found, and what needs attention next. It lands in your inbox every month whether anything broke or not.
What this isn't
This isn't a helpdesk. Printer trouble and slow email are somebody else's job; this service takes care of the layer underneath, the servers and network everything else sits on. If you need someone on the phone in ten minutes, this isn't the right fit, and it's better you know that up front.
Have a careful owner's questions?
Guarantees, insurance, what happens if I'm unavailable, who plugs in hardware, and what you keep if you cancel. The FAQ answers all of it in writing.
How it works
Read Working together
Quiet, and out of your way.
STEP 1
Assisted onboarding
A guided one-time setup of secure on-demand access over VPN and SSH. There is no permanent tunnel into your network. Access opens for maintenance and closes when the work is done. On the rare day hardware needs physical hands, someone on your side plugs it in; everything else happens remotely.
STEP 2
Baseline & plan
Your environment gets documented: servers, directory, backup jobs, firewall state, storage. You see the baseline report and a maintenance calendar before the first invoice.
STEP 3
Overnight windows
Maintenance runs in fixed windows outside your business hours. Updates, reboots, and restore tests happen while your office is empty. Your staff never notices.
STEP 4
Report & repeat
Every month closes with the written health report. Requests and questions go through a ticket queue and get answered in writing.
Why "no standing access" matters
Most managed IT providers keep a permanent agent or tunnel inside your network, which means their breach is your breach. Ask anyone who has worked breach forensics where intrusions start, and the always-on vendor tunnel comes up again and again. Here, remote access only exists while maintenance is being performed, over channels you can see, and everything is logged. There is simply nothing standing open for an attacker to find.
One handshake, then peace of mind
Nobody should hand the keys to their infrastructure to someone they've never seen. When you approve the plan, onboarding starts with a video call: you meet me, we walk the baseline together, and you can ask anything you like. That call usually ends the stressful IT meetings for good. Once a year I'll offer a short strategic review to look ahead at budget, growth plans, and aging hardware before any of it becomes a surprise. The rest of the time the monthly report does the talking, questions go through the ticket queue, and the 2 AM worrying about backups and servers comes off your plate.
Already have an office computer whiz, or a junior IT hire? Keep them. This service stands behind them rather than replacing them: they keep the day-to-day, the servers and backups and firewall get senior attention, and they get a deep bench to call on. They end up looking better, and you never have to hire that seniority full time.
Want the whole engagement, start to finish?
The Working Together page walks every stage, from your first written note to the quiet monthly rhythm, so nothing about the relationship is a surprise.
Read before you buy
See exactly what you'd be getting.
Every engagement starts with a baseline document and every month closes with a written report. Both are real samples you can read right now, prepared for a fictional company so nothing is hidden behind a sales call.
The baseline & 90-day plan
What lands in your inbox after discovery and before the first invoice: an honest map of your environment, findings in plain English, what's already fine, and a scheduled plan with costs for what isn't.
The monthly health report
Five pages from a Complete-tier month: backup verifications, a timed restore drill, the patch window, firewall audit results, and the recommendations waiting on the owner's decision.
Beyond the retainer
One-time projects, quoted flat.
Some work isn't monthly. Projects get scoped in writing, quoted as one flat number, and executed with a rollback plan staged before anything is touched.
Migrations
Server & service migrations
Moving workloads onto new hardware, into virtualization, or off a dying box. Data integrity gets verified byte for byte before the old system is retired.
Upgrades
Major-version upgrades
Hypervisors, firewalls, and server operating systems. The upgrades everyone postpones, done least-critical-first with a tested rollback path staged in advance.
Identity
Single sign-on rollout
One login for everything your business runs, with separate admin and staff access enforced at the gateway. No more fifteen passwords on sticky notes.
Security
Hardening & incident response
Perimeter review and intrusion prevention deployment. If something has already gone wrong: containment, forensics, and closing the gaps it exposed.
Documents
Document digitization
A scan-to-searchable document system with OCR and automatic classification. The result is a filing cabinet that searches itself.
Evidence
ISP accountability
When your provider insists everything looks fine on their end, a monitoring pipeline captures each outage with timestamps and traceroutes. Arguments end quickly when one side brings data.
Who does the work
Twenty years, from bank branches to 24/7 transit operations.
I'm Dave Walter, an enterprise infrastructure architect with two decades in production environments. My degree is in computer forensics, and my early career included work for government and law enforcement agencies. From there I moved through regulated, audited financial-sector small businesses running the same Microsoft stack most small companies run today, and on to 24/7 international transportation operations where an outage leaves real people stranded.
I've also sat on the owner's side of the desk. In 2011 I opened a storefront computer shop in small-town Ohio, under the same LLC this practice runs on today. I fixed machines, built PCs, and by 2013 I was selling scheduled maintenance plans to local businesses. I know what a bad server week costs a small company because I was the one they called, and this service exists so that call never has to happen.
The methods on this page come from environments where "we think the backup works" is not an acceptable sentence. I take a configuration baseline before every change, stage a rollback plan out of habit, and test restores instead of assuming they work.
I also build and run a private datacenter as a working reference environment: a seven-node virtualization cluster, a three-layer security stack (intrusion prevention, DNS reputation filtering, and full network forensics) tuned against real attack data, verified immutable backups, and a self-hosted AI operations layer, including an out-of-band recovery agent that can reach the environment even when every normal access path is down. I've run all of it remotely, months at a stretch, for years. Your infrastructure gets cared for under the same model.
That datacenter is also my proving ground. It runs the same firewall and virtualization platforms I deploy for clients, so upgrades and procedures get exercised on my own equipment before they reach yours. By the time a change hits your maintenance window, it has already been fully vetted.
- In production
- 20+ years
- In business
- Same LLC since 2011
- Degree
- Computer forensics
- Environment range
- 2-server offices to 8+ domain-controller mission-critical operations
- Reference environment
- 7-node cluster, 40+ live services, 100+ TB storage
- Security monitoring
- Prevention, reputation, forensics
- Remote operations
- You relax, I take the infrastructure burden while you sleep
- Access model
- On-demand VPN + SSH, nothing standing
Pricing
Flat monthly fee. Published, like it should be.
There is no hourly billing here and no "call for a quote." You pay one number every month, and it covers everything listed in your tier.
Essentials
$500
per month · up to 3 servers/VMs
- Monthly backup verification
- Monthly patching window
- Quarterly directory & storage review
- Quarterly firewall & VPN audit
- Monthly written health report
- Infrastructure documentation kept current
- Ticket queue, answered in writing
Standard
$750
per month · up to 6 servers/VMs
- Everything in Essentials
- Monthly directory & storage review
- Monthly firewall & VPN audit
- Monthly security-monitoring review
- Quarterly restore test (full recovery drill)
- Monitoring & disk-health review
- Priority ticket queue
Complete
$1,000
per month · up to 12 servers/VMs
- Everything in Standard
- Twice-monthly backup verification
- Managed monitoring & alerting stack
- Semi-annual disaster-recovery exercise
Not sure where you fit? Most offices with three to six servers land on Standard. Larger or unusual environments get a custom quote, still a flat fee and never hourly. Every engagement starts with the baseline review, so your first report arrives before your first invoice.
Contact
Start with a written note.
There's no phone number on this page, on purpose. Written communication is part of the service. Every request stays documented, and nothing gets promised on a call and then forgotten.
Tell me roughly what your infrastructure looks like: how many servers, what runs on them, what worries you. Every inquiry gets a considered, written reply, usually within two business days.
I work with businesses anywhere in the United States, usually alongside an internal IT person or an office go-to. Maintenance windows run outside your business hours, no matter your time zone.