5 Essential IT Housekeeping Tips for the Summer

Although summer is as busy as any other season in some industries, there are businesses where these weeks tend to be a little bit more relaxed. If you are working as a system admin or operator, this makes for the perfect time for a company-wide IT housekeeping. Check out our tips compiled with the help of Tresorit’s IT team, to get the most out of this summer in your workplace!

• Get your paperwork done

Depending on your company rules, you probably have a lot of documentation materials to keep in check. Things like updating user manuals or reviewing technical and internal notes about known network issues are part of those tasks that often get dismissed during busy days.

Create a detailed plan to update these during the summer and follow through!

• Take care of inventory

If not done on a regular basis, taking stock of all the devices in the network is a painful task. Devote a calm summer week while people are on vacation to document the amount of laptops, workstations, and smartphones available.

Depending on the size of your organization, you might already use inventory management tools for this. These save you the hassle of stock keeping and also provide useful monitoring features – use the summer period to try them out and migrate data from your custom solutions.

• Research new tools and software

Do you keep a list of all the software tools that would be nice to have in your organization? Take this time to do some online research on them and create summaries for decision-makers about the tools and their advantages.

By doing this, you can get ready to present your ideas in an organized way – your colleagues will love this when they get back from holiday.

• Update knowledge base and policies

Do you have internal policies in place for risk and crisis management, employee onboarding and offboarding, BYOD practices and IT security? If any or some of these have been on your to-do-list for a while, stop procrastinating and start working on them now!

Don’t forget to share the materials with your organization in a secure way and make sure to control who can edit them. If you use Tresorit DRM, you can manage rights and permissions easily. See how you can do this!

• Update and organize software inventory
  

Are you sure the team is using all the software you are licensing? Tidying up your software inventory is essential for both budget saving and security reasons.

Larger operating system or server updates usually require overnight or weekend installations, but don’t forget about other software that need to be updated as well.

+1 Make sure to have a deputy when you are going on vacation!

Even if you don’t have a large IT team, try to find a responsible person within the organization who can be your substitute in handling some of the most urgent tasks.