Chances are you already know why you are looking at a proposal for managed services, but if you need a reminder, you need only ask yourself, “was my previous system actually working for me, or was I just lucky that I hadn’t had a catastrophe?” Was the previous system designed to protect the precious and valuable Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in your care? More likely, it was only designed to make sure that your computers powered up every morning, which is a small part of managed IT service. If you store any information about anybody at all (customers or clients, patients, employees, prospects, and even email correspondence), you possess information that is valuable to criminals and you have a legal obligation to protect it.
Frequently asked questions
A managed service is a partnership where you turn over custodianship of as much of your IT as practical and we make decisions in your best interest, look after things in the background, and support your operations day to day as required. The hardware for the infrastructure is provided as a service, which means FTL retains ownership and also responsibility for the hardware. Recovery from failures of the infrastructure hardware (excepting physical abuse) is covered in your agreement, as well as ensuring hardware is refreshed at prudent intervals.
As part of the early discovery process, we may uncover changes that would impact your monthly price and will revise the proposal accordingly.
You. Always you. You own your data, and as you can see below, there is a plan for you to access those data even if it is not possible to administer the FTL Drive for any reason.
The FTL Drive service is delivered at your place of business and there is no built-in kill switch that is suddenly going to halt the service if you cannot make payments to FTL. Therefore, even if FTL were to disappear tomorrow, the service would continue to operate. Contrast this with a cloud service, where if the service provider disappears and/or stops paying their bills, the cloud service will cease to function.
What you would lose if FTL disappeared, is access to the expertise needed to troubleshoot issues with the service and the expertise needed to maintain it. Given the reliability of the solution, you should have time to find a new service provider that would be able to deploy a new solution for you and migrate your data off the FTL Drive to their new solution.
The FTL Drive service includes an important and unique safeguard for your business in the form of a locally attached backup drive. This backup drive will contain an encrypted copy of all your data that resides on the FTL Drive. As long as you have this backup drive and the key to decrypt it (which will be provided in a sealed envelope), you have the ability to immediately gain access to your data. You could copy it to a new server, copy it to a laptop, copy it to a cloud service, or whatever you need to do to keep your business operating.
Yes, with a revised installation charge.
For two weeks after the deployment date, work that is or perceived to be related to the network upgrade is covered (i.e., not new Professional Services). Anything clearly outside of the Scope of Work would have to be discussed.
Wi-Fi can be installed and managed as part of the solution for offices that require it.
OR
Since we will replace the existing Wi-Fi equipment as part of the installation, Wi-Fi gear and setup has been included in this proposal.
If the equipment is under a maintenance agreement from another provider (e.g., a managed printer), or if the equipment manufacturer freely distributes drivers for the current version of your operating system (e.g., Windows 10), then the device can be supported as Tech Support (Supported Software). If the device in question is not officially supported by the manufacturer for the current version of your operating system, then we can still try to make it work, but that work would be classified as Tech Support (Unsupported Software).
As much as possible, FTL will try to provide phone and remote support rather than going to your place of business. As part of the service, we provide remote access software to allow (only) FTL staff to access your computers at the same time as staff, so we can see what your staff are seeing in real-time. Onsite service is available for circumstances where remote support cannot be provided.