The advantages of a Managed Service Plan

This year we will be talking to all of our clients about the advantages of moving to a Managed Service Plan (MSP).

We’ve written about this a while back, but here we are collating our resources for you to be able to easily access this information and share it with anyone in your business who may have questions.

If you prefer, we’ve made a quick video which covers some of the basics.

Firstly a Quick Review

We wrote a full article here about what “How a Managed Service Provider can help your business”, but lets do a quick review.

  • In a nutshell an MSP is your ‘outsourced IT Dept’ that provides proactive IT support.
  • An MSP provides preventative measures, detecting most issues long before they become a problem.
  • An MSP differs from the ‘break-fix’ model of IT support, where you call an IT company when something breaks, and they come and fix it, on an adhoc pay by hour model. (You can read the full article on the difference between an MSP vs Block hours here).

What are the advantages of an MSP?

  • We become an IT partner to your business.
  • We provide proactive IT support.
  • We understand your business, and have knowledge of your needs.
  • Helps with budgeting and cost savings.

So, how does a Managed Service plan work?

Firstly, we help you to determine the level of support that you require.

Ultra IT provide three levels of an MSP agreement depending on the requirements of your business.

We have the Basic, Professional and Ultra package available.

This is a brief overview of what is covered, dependent on the package that you decide to go with.

  • Remote Monitoring.
  • Continuous 24/7 security including regular and ongoing system updates, software patching, and antivirus.
  • Optimising hardware.
  • Strategic advice.
  • Regular reviews.
  • Business Continuity and disaster-recovery strategy.

What is an Service Level Agreement (SLA)?

Part of the MSP contract includes a Service Level Agreement or an SLA. Having an SLA in place for businesses is crucial so that you know what to expect when you have a support request.

The SLA clarifies things like:

  • Responsiveness of the service: Details of how quickly the service will be delivered. How long you can expect to wait for support, for both the initial response and the onsite time.
  • How to contact us.
  • Service description.
  • Quality of service.

A real life example from Morgan Engineering

“Shifting to the Managed Service plan has taken the pressure off. Ultra IT helped us seamlessly move from Dropbox to Sharepoint, which meant increased ease of using our folders, plus increased security. They also helped us streamline our email, with purchasing hardware and with moving to 365. In the past, if we had an IT issue I would panic. Now I know that I can just contact the team at Ultra, and they are so fast and efficient and just sort out everything, which is a great comfort”

I would definitely recommend Ultra IT as your Managed Service Provider.”

Christine Sanford – Company Financial Officer

In Summary

A Managed Service Plan just makes good business sense. We will be talking to all of our clients individually about your specific needs and what plan is the best for you in the upcoming months. As always, if you have any queries please do not hesitate to reach out to us here.

ChatGPT – Is it safe for New Zealand businesses?

Last month we talked about how New Zealand businesses can benefit from ChatGPT. (Read the blog here) We’ve had so many clients interested in how ChatGPT can help their business, that we are talking here about it again!

What we are looking at here is weighing its advantages against the security implications.

Firstly, a quick review. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence language model designed to generate human-like responses. The increasingly popular AI-powered platform has a wide range of applications.

ChatGPT responds to questions or commands, drawing on pre-training using large amounts of text data. The inputs include books, articles, and websites on a wide range of topics.

The model can help automate aspects of business communication and streamline business processes.

Ways to use ChatGPT include:

  • providing customer support by training it to answer common questions and resolve issues;
  • generating leads by having ChatGPT collect data from website visitors to qualify leads;
  • offering personalized recommendations, product information, and marketing promotions;
  • giving employees quick access to internal policies, IT support, or training materials;
  • finding errors in computer code;
  • calculating spreadsheet data.

This can be a huge productivity boost for businesses when used correctly. However, you should be aware of some downsides.

ChatGPT is not perfect

You can get ChatGPT only via a Web browser right now. You’ll register via OpenAI, which developed the model. Don’t download an app claiming to give you access to ChatGPT. Bad actors create those fake apps to defraud or scam you.

But there are other risks a business should weigh up. Keep in mind that the technology may generate inappropriate or inaccurate responses, as the model may pull data from biased or discriminatory sources.

The model may not understand your question or request completely either. The more complex or nuanced your prompt, the greater a challenge it is for ChatGPT as it learns to understand and respond accurately.

Further, the safety of ChatGPT depends on your use case, as well as the level of control and monitoring you use. Someone else may have the copyright on the information output you get from ChatGPT. Review any ChatGPT output before using it.

Also, be careful of the input you give to ChatGPT. For example, asking it to find errors in proprietary code could risk your data security. ChatGPT itself currently warns users against providing sensitive data.

After all, the model uses all its available data to respond. So, if you enter sensitive data, it might end up being disclosed to another user who makes a similar request.

Your industry may also be subject to strict data privacy rules. If ChatGPT output contains confidential data, you may breach industry standards or government regulations.

Using technology safely

Technology can transform the way you do business, which can be a good thing. Still, you’ll want to consider the legal and privacy risks before proceeding with ChatGPT.

Interested in learning more about workflow automation and streamlining communication through business technology? Contact us at Ultra IT and we can help you evaluate the best solution to meet your needs.