In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, having a reliable and efficient IT infrastructure is crucial for the success of any business. UniVista has created its Comprehensive Support Agreement to fill this goal for any business or organization of any size. Below are the key components of our Comprehensive Agreement, emphasizing the benefits they can bring to your organization.

Support Workstation, Servers, Cisco, and Firewalls:

UniVista’s Comprehensive Support Agreement provides comprehensive support for your installed workstations, servers, networking devices and firewalls at no additional cost to you. This coverage ensures that your critical IT infrastructure components are proactively managed and maintained to minimize downtime and maximize productivity, all within a defined budget.

Patch Management and Network Security Analysis:

To ensure the stability and security of your IT infrastructure, UniVista handles patch management for all covered servers and workstations. This includes keeping the operating systems and various applications like Windows OS, Adobe software, Google Chrome, along with others, up to date. Additionally, we conduct network security and performance analysis to find and mitigate any vulnerabilities in your network. 

On-Site Visits and IT Strategy Planning:

UniVista schedules regular on-site visits to foster a strong client-provider relationship. These visits allow our IT experts to assess your infrastructure, address potential issues, and align your IT strategy with your business objectives. We use this information to develop a comprehensive IT strategy, along with a budget that ensures your technology investments are aligned with your organizational goals.

IT Inventory Management and Help Desk Support:

UniVista’s Comprehensive Support Agreement includes management of all the assets we monitor. This ensures your organizations hardware and software are tracked and kept working to their best ability. Additionally, we understand that swift resolution of IT issues is vital for keeping your operations running smoothly. That’s why UniVista’s dedicated help desk support team is available to provide prompt assistance remotely or on-site when needed. 

24×7 After-Hours Business Stopping Emergency Support:

We recognize the importance of uninterrupted business operations, which is why UniVista offers 24×7 after-hours support for business-stopping issues. Our team of IT Professionals is equipped to handle business-stopping emergency issues promptly, with a maximum response time of one hour, ensuring that critical problems are addressed swiftly, minimizing any potential impact on your operations.

Active Directory and Email Server Management:

UniVista’s Comprehensive Support Agreement covers hosted or on premises Microsoft Active Directory maintenance and management, ensuring that your organization’s user environment will be secure and well-organized. UniVista will also manage and support your corporate Microsoft 365 email system, enabling reliable communication channels within your organization.

UniVista Cybersecurity Suite and VPN (Virtual Private Network) Implementation:

The UniVista Cybersecurity Suite is included with every Comprehensive Support Agreement which helps your organization safeguard its digital assets, providing advanced protection against cyber threats. For more information on the UniVista Cybersecurity Suite, see this blog post: https://univista.com/posts/the-importance-of-cybersecurity-training-and-why-you-should-take-advantage-of-univistas-customer-training-opportunities/. UniVista also implements and manages all your organization’s VPN (Virtual Private Network) solutions, ensuring secure remote access to your network resources.

SharePoint Management and Server Monitoring:

UniVista’s Comprehensive Support Agreement includes SharePoint management, enabling efficient collaboration and document sharing within your organization. UniVista provides 24×7 monitoring of your supported servers.  This proactive approach allows us to detect and resolve potential issues before they affect your operations.

Access to Document Library and Emergency Equipment:

UniVista’s Comprehensive Support Agreement allows your organization access to UniVista’s Company Library, providing valuable resources including policies and procedure templates. In case of equipment failure, we offer an emergency loan for SonicWALL or Cisco firewalls or switches, ensuring minimal disruption to your operations.

Monthly IT Health Reports and Preferred Rates:

As part of UniVista’s commitment to transparency, we provide monthly IT health reports summarizing the performance and status of your IT infrastructure. Moreover, for situations that fall outside a scope of work, we offer preferred rates, supplying cost-effective flexibility when you need more IT support.

By partnering with UniVista through a Comprehensive Support Agreement, you provide your organization with proactive, reliable, efficient, and secure IT support.

If you’re not currently a UniVista customer but would like to learn more about how UniVista’s Comprehensive Support Agreement could offer organizations like yours piece-of-mind and control over IT requirements, please don’t hesitate to contact us.  If you have questions regarding any individual component of UniVista’s Comprehensive Support Agreement, please don’t hesitate to contact us, as well. At UniVista we specialize in taking the worry out of IT and freeing your time to do what you do best; managing and growing your business.

For more info: [email protected] or 512-832-6209, option 2. We are always here to help.

We recently posted some of UniVista’s concerns regarding ChatGPT, however it has come to our attention that some may not be very familiar with the technology, nor its benefits and especially some of its risks.  To help clarify things a bit more, here is a basic rundown of what it is, what it does and where and why you need to tread carefully with the technology.

ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI, which was released in November 2022.  ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is an app (available free for its basic version and via a monthly subscription for an enhanced version) that can assist users with writing tasks by suggesting ideas, helping create outlines and even suggesting dialogue.  Initially, ChatGPT’s AI language model was trained using a large body of text from numerous sources including Wikipedia, books, news articles, scientific journals, etc.  However, that was only the start of its education.  The more the platform is used, the more it will “know” and some of that knowledge will come directly from users like you. 

The ChatGPT app can be useful when used to help with writing tasks like blogs, reports and can even assist with writing correspondence like emails and texts.  However, as we pointed out in our previous blog and communication from our president (link to blog here), though the technology is exciting there are still many bugs in the platform, in addition to many security risks.  Because, as we mentioned above, ChatGPT is a system that incorporates and absorbs user-fed information into its data, inadvertent sharing of confidential information may occur. Even under the most innocent of circumstances such sharing would be in violation of privacy agreements you may have in place.

Something to keep in mind is that ChatGPT isn’t perfect, it only “knows” what it has been taught.  And, unfortunately sometimes what it has been taught may be wrong, or incorrectly interpreted, and may give you incorrect information or suggestions. Another issue to be aware of is that the platform does collect user information including your IP address, your browser type and settings, along with data regarding your interactions on the site, which includes the type of content, features and actions you are engaging with.  Additionally, ChatGPT saves your chat history, which goes back to our warning about inadvertently sharing sensitive information.  In fact, there are a host of companies, including JP Morgan Chase, Amazon, Verizon and Accenture, that have voiced concerns about the security of the platform and have barred their employees from using ChatGPT for work.

So, while the technology is exciting and full of potential it is not without its risks.  Time will tell as more bugs are discovered and addressed whether it’s something to rely on during your daily business practices.

 

AFTERTHOUGHTS:

As a final note – it seems that the old adage that “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”, is true.  To help determine whether a body of text has been written via AI vs a human, a few new “AI detectors” have recently hit the market.  Essentially these Written AI detectors use various means to determine if something is human-written or if AI wrote the piece.

As one would expect, the written AI phenomena has caused an issue in academics, and it became important to ascertain whether a student actually wrote the essay or term paper they turned in.  To that end a young (22 years old) Princeton Student, Edward Tian, developed GPTZero (GPTZero). GPTZero has a 98% accurate detection rate, and as an exercise we ran this human-written article through their platform and was given this result: