While IT is quite essential to keep businesses running, a lot of projects could very well have met the chopping block or been delayed due to budget freezes. Don’t despair! There’s much that can be done while users are remote to help you get ahead and looking like a million bucks when we get back to the office.
Take Advantage of Your Empty Office
If your workplace has gone mostly remote, this might be a good time for you to get up in there and move some things around and make changes. Been meaning to optimize your Wi-Fi coverage or do that post install survey? Maybe your server room needs some serious reorganization/cable management.
Run Firmware/OS Updates or Reboot Servers
We don’t all hop on Patch Tuesday as quickly as we should. If you’ve got some time, though, getting all your systems up to the latest known good software/firmware is a great task. This means Windows Server, Exchange, SQL, etc. Or if you’ve got servers that have been running for far too long, take this time to give them a reboot.
Improve Your Password Hygiene
It’s hard to remember to do simple things like change your admin passwords when you’re in the middle of the onslaught of the day. However, now is a great time to take your service account passwords and change them to something crazy long and secure (and maybe put them on multi-factor authentication). It might also be a good idea to check on when the last password change occurred for all your users and address any that have passwords that never expire. What’s your corporate password/security policy? Update it if its outdated or if you don’t have one, get the ball rolling for that.
Review Your Network Security
If you were rushed to set up remote access for your organization, there’s a chance you may have had to take some shortcuts to get up and running. Now’s the time to evaluate your network security and lock down any vulnerabilities you can find.
Test Backup Restores
When was the last time you actually tested your restore process? Take some time now and do it. And we don’t mean just validating the backup is good – is your whole process good? Does it take the amount of time to restore that you thought it would? Do you have your procedure down and well documented?
Test Your Backup Power
Just like testing your restore process, have you tested failing over to your backup power? Give that a shot now when the stakes are low, so you’re not caught by surprise with an unplanned power outage.
User Cleanup
Remove or recategorize (if you don’t want to remove) old users from your domain and/or your Office 365. It’s messy to keep old users in there and could be a security vulnerability.
Update Your Documentation
No one likes it, but it’s a critical piece to managing your environment and it often falls by the wayside. It doesn’t usually become a problem until you have an emergency, and you need someone to step in and help or you can’t figure out what VM does what. So pour yourself a heaping cup of coffee and get to work mapping everything out.
Bonus: update your disaster recovery plan. If you don’t have one, here’s a free downloadable template from us to get you started.
Set Up End User Security Training
Malicious cybersecurity attacks are on the rise, particularly towards organizations that are new to the remote work thing. End users are the biggest vulnerability you have – show them how to recognize phishing attacks or suspicious activity. Show them how to send encrypted emails. It’s easy to do this virtually through Microsoft Teams!