The December Lull

When business is slow, that’s the perfect time for you and your company to take care of your systems. End of year maintenance is essential, and will keep your business running smoothly year round.

That Holiday Feeling

Tryptophan storms the scene on Thanksgiving, and sleepiness sets in that has most people in a swoon ‘til January. People are distracted, business and correspondence can be slow, and your best employees may be visiting family in another time zone.

Rather than feeling frustrated, take this opportunity to do the following:

• Check your Backups
• Update your Systems
• Get rid of the old
• Setup of the new (this could take some research… call at Jobst Consulting if you need help!)

Disclaimer: B2B Versus Retail

This advice is geared to B2B companies. If you are a retail company, please- ignore everything we just said! You should be gearing up to have all systems running full tilt to handle all the traffic that’s going to be thrown at it.

Wait until after the New Year to make any changes that might jeopardize your ability to sell, sell, sell in those weeks before Christmas.

What to Update:

Servers

One of the first changes to make should be updating your servers.

Security

Next, make sure you’re secure!

The only security breach that should happen is Santa climbing down the chimney to give you the iPhone 7 Plus, a new drone and a Magnum of Moet and Chandon.

Any other security cracks should be patched. While this should be updated on a monthly basis, there is no time like the holidays to do a thorough evaluation and update. If there are systems that you haven’t been updating, consider taking them out.

Are there paid services on Amazon Web Services that you’re not using? Double-check, and save yourself money.

Data

Check to see if you have duplicate data, and then do a 2016 Year Backup.

When you’re done eliminating the duplicate data and backing it up, take that off-site. Your home, bank, or an iron mountain are great options for off site storage of drives. Send your year-round summary to a cloud backup as well.

Hardware

Look around your office for dead weight. Are there old desktops that nobody uses anymore? Pull the data off of them and get them shut down. It’ll save you energy, office space, not to mention and money when cut down on power.

Shut down anything that you don’t need running!

Expect the Unexpected

Cleaning house and updating systems is guaranteed to break something or another. However, it is better to handle these issues during a purposeful maintenance window than for little things to pop up all throughout the year at unexpected times. So bite the bullet, call the experts, and take care of business while business is slow.

Last but not least… Treat Yourself!

It’s the end of year, and your last chance to buy things for budgets or tax purposes. Get your Write-offs in while you can! Pick up that big screen TV for the office, or buy new laptops.

May your days be merry and bright, and may all your servers work right.