About Joshua Back & Blue Reef Solutions

The Path

Fourteen years inside managed IT — every tier of it

I started in managed IT services in February 2012, fresh out of college with zero experience — help desk, tier one, answering phones. Over the years I worked through every level of the craft: tier two, tier three, project engineer, and eventually senior solutions architect, serving as the senior technical authority for a seventeen-person engineering team.

Along the way I've worked inside multiple MSPs — and when you've seen this industry from the inside for fourteen years, you develop a sharp eye for how these companies actually run. Many operate in permanent firefighting mode: adding clients faster than they can support them, always reacting, never planning. The clients feel it, even when they can't name it.

Blue Reef Solutions, founded in 2022, is built deliberately as the opposite of that. Small on purpose. Senior on purpose. Structured on purpose.

Joshua Back
Founder & Principal Engineer

How I Work

The principles under every engagement

Own the outcome

Accountability means owning results — including the ones I got wrong. I've been on the receiving end of that standard, and honestly, it's a gift. When accountability applies to everyone, you can trust the environment you're working in. I bring that same standard to every client engagement.

Automate the repetitive away

PowerShell, RMM tooling, workflow automation — I'd rather spend a day eliminating a recurring task than a career repeating it. Hours not burned on rote work are hours spent on the problems that actually move your environment forward.

Documentation is a deliverable

I've overhauled documentation systems from the ground up, and it shaped a conviction: knowledge that lives in one person's head is a liability. Every Blue Reef engagement produces written findings and runbooks your team owns.

Plan, then adjust honestly

The best-run environments plan deliberately, measure against the plan, and adjust when reality changes — instead of pretending nothing happened. That discipline is rare in IT. It's the operating system Blue Reef runs on.

Security is the lens, not a line item

Infrastructure, identity, monitoring, and operations all get viewed through a security lens first — Huntress MDR, patch governance, and Microsoft 365 hardening aren't add-ons, they're the baseline.

Niche depth over broad promises

I started working with Amtelco environments around 2015 — a unique challenge most IT providers never encounter, and one I genuinely enjoyed working through. What began as entirely on-premise infrastructure, I re-architected to run primarily in Azure. A decade in that niche is Blue Reef's moat, and why we're a NAEO vendor member.

Why "Deliberately Small"

You get the engineer. That's the whole model.

Most MSPs scale by adding bodies and routing you through a queue. Blue Reef scales by staying focused: a limited number of clients, each getting direct access to a senior engineer who knows their environment personally. No tiers, no handoffs, no re-explaining your setup to a stranger.

That's also why the engagement model is honest about fit — if your organization needs a large help desk operation, Blue Reef isn't the right partner, and I'll tell you that in the first conversation.

At a Glance

The short version

In managed IT services since February 2012
Help desk → tier 2 → tier 3 → project engineer → senior solutions architect
Senior technical authority for a 17-person engineering team
Founded Blue Reef Solutions in 2022
Microsoft 365, Azure, cybersecurity operations, automation
Working with Amtelco environments since 2015 — including re-architecting on-premise Amtelco infrastructure to run in Azure
NAEO vendor member · Remote-first, U.S.-based

The engineer behind Blue Reef