What you should do to start 2024 on the right foot.
As the year draws to a close, you naturally start thinking about Christmas, holidays, eating too much and spending time with friends and family.
But before you sign off for the year, you should absolutely be doing the following to make sure that 2024 goes off with a bang and not a fizzle.
- Set up your email auto responders / auto replies and advise your team to do it too.
Having an auto responder advising your clients/contacts that you are out of the office from x date to y date helps set the expectation of when they will receive a response. A good example of an auto responder is:
Thank you for your email.
I will be out of the office from DD/MM/YYY and will be returning on DD/MM/YYY.
If you need immediate assistance, please email (Name) at (email address) or call (phone number).Best Regards,
Joe Smith
- Setup your phone systems out of hours greeting advising when your office will be closed from and to. For much the same reason as email auto responders, setting your phone system out of hours message sets the expectation for your customers/contacts on when they can receive a response.
- Advise staff to stay vigilant of any potential phishing/email scams over the break.
Holiday periods are often when scam/phishing emails ramp up, in particular there is an increase in emails imitating legitimate causes like Charities/NFPs (RedCross, St Vinnies, World Vision so on). These fake emails will be pulling at people’s heart strings for payments and charitable contributions. If you want to make donations, then go directly to the charities website rather than clicking on links in emails. - Check that you have successful Offsite / Offline backups prior to closing shop.
The only way to know if a backup has worked is if you have been able to successfully restore files from said backup. If you have someone else managing your backups for your business request they do a test restore to ensure its integrity.
- Check your CCTV systems are working correctly.
Sadly, holiday periods are a prime time for crooks to take advantage of businesses being closed. Make sure that you log into your CCTV system and test the following:- Check that all cameras are working.
- Ensure that the date and time are correct.
- Check that your system will retain footage for 45 days or more.
- Run a test export of camera footage from a couple of days ago. This will show you that your system is recording correctly.
- Advise your security company of when site will be unattended.
- Disable any leaving staff accounts / set expiry dates.
When staff leave it is imperative that you disable their accounts to help cut down on the potential of account compromise and/or data falling into the wrong hands. Depending on your environment and systems you can often set an expiration date for accounts, so they automatically disable. - Schedule your social media posts and blog content.
During the holiday season often people have a bit of time on their hands and start looking for new products, services so on. If you aren’t active during the holiday season you will be left behind and miss out on opportunities. Schedule your social media posts to send out periodically and take advantage of the ‘off season’. - Power off any equipment that doesn’t need to be online.
With power prices being what they are, it is important that you power off any equipment that doesn’t need to remain online. This will help you save money and also reduce operational hours on devices. It also helps to reduce the chances of any fires/electrical hazards.
You should be looking at devices like Kitchen appliances, TVs, Check-in kiosks, printers, heaters/fans so on.
The team at Runtime IT have a skeleton staff working through the break, looking after our customers IT environments. We do the worrying about your IT so that you don’t need to. This lets our customers enjoy some well-deserved down time.
Give us a call today to see how we can take the worry out of your IT.
