As each year winds to a close, you might find you have a big pile of tasks waiting to be completed. Anything from budgeting to taxes to inventory management and more, the end of the year sneaks up on the best of us.

IT tasks are no different.

Keeping up with technology requires a regular, organized effort, and at the end of the year, we often see gaps that emerge from the previous months.

The best way to manage that and keep your organization in great shape is to carve out time for an end-of-year review. You can go through important items to see where you stand and what you need to change.

The easiest way to approach this review is with a simple checklist of maintenance tasks.

This is why industry experts came together to create standards that direct cabling providers exactly how they should arrange devices and run cables. Using those industry standards means the tangled wires are replaced with cohesive bundles that are properly mapped, labeled, and much easier to work with. IT support providers and their network administrators follow these standards so that your network is quicker to maintain, troubleshoot and fix. 

Structured cabling and unstructured cabling both have a purpose and taking a few minutes to learn about business cabling could save you and your business frustration and downtime.

What is the Checklist?

We’re not reinventing the wheel here. This is a checklist that can help you cover all of your IT bases by the end of the year. If any item is lagging, you want to accomplish these tasks before the year is over.

If you normally do something on the list in the middle of the year instead, that’s fine. The checklist still allows you to review what you have completed and how it fits into your business strategy.

Why do you need it?

The checklist covers security, compliance, efficacy, and planning. It gives you a roadmap to make sure you’re accomplishing the tasks you need to, as well as the ones you have to do, hope to do, and actually completed.

The IT checklist is a tool to help you keep track of your organization’s relationship to technology and the resources devoted to it.

What Should Be Included?

Before we get to the detailed checklist, remember an important fact. You don’t have to do everything on this list specifically at the end of the year. Instead, this checklist is designed to ensure that you cover your bases throughout the year.
That said, some things make more sense to do when the year is coming to a close.
With that said, here’s a quick checklist for you:

• Security audit
• Policies and procedures review
• Data backup
• Inventory
• Training planning
• Compliance review
• Recovery planning
• Budget review and projection
• Future plans
  
  

Security Audit

Every year should start with a good understanding of the state of your cybersecurity. Audits can be broken apart throughout the year, but you need to know where you stand when the year is done.

Essentially, you want your Omaha cyber security team to review your plan and see if you have hit your goals. You also want to audit all hardware and software to make sure everything is up-to-date and current. A security change log goes a long way.

Policies and Procedures

Technology policies and procedures apply directly to IT personnel, but you need to review and update policies and procedures for the rest departments and staff as well. Everyone needs to understand how they must follow the IT policies and procedures.

The year-end review is an important task that often finds procedures that could use an update. This is a great time to go ahead and formalize those updates. Later in the checklist, you will review employee training, and if you update your policies and procedures first, you’ll know some of the items to include in that training strategy.

Data Backup

Obviously, data backups should occur at regular intervals. Relative to an annual checklist, you will want to complete a verification that your data backup systems are operating and functioning. This isn’t the only time to perform a verification; however, it is wise to perform it with your other checklist items.

Check your backup infrastructure as well. How old is the equipment? Determine if it needs to be replaced and add it to your budget.

If you do not have on-premise and cloud backups in place, now is the time to put them in place, or at the minimum, budget the cost for the new year. And don’t forget about Microsoft 365 backup which saves copies of your email and OneDrive files. Your Omaha IT support provider can use a tool that performs this seamlessly.

Inventory

It’s important to know what you have and an annual inventory helps with that. If your inventory doesn’t happen specifically at the end of the year, it should occur regularly and be part of your checklist during the year.

Inventory all of your hardware and software. If you inventory at the end of the year, it can help you know what needs to be updated and thus add that to your budget.

It can also help you track old systems that are ready for decommissioning. You can include that with this point in your checklist. Decommission your old hardware and make certain any sensitive information is properly scrubbed or shredded. Then, you can properly dispose of the equipment.

Training

When you update your policies and procedures, you’ll identify areas you’ll want to include in training plans for the upcoming year.

You also want to schedule security awareness training for staff. Everyone in the organization will want to update their skills with the latest risks and threats. Your Omaha IT services provider can help you with this.

The training itself does not need to happen at the end of the year. Ideally, it should occur throughout the year to get the best results. However, if you need time to plan for the coming year and what program you want to put in place, now is the time to do that and check it on your list.

Compliance

A compliance review ensures you are following all industry or regulatory requirements. You should be considering compliance every time you change a policy, add a service, or make any significant change to your business operations.

You should also review compliance at the end of each year.

Regulators update the rules throughout the year, and often these come with grace periods that expire. January 1 is a common expiration date.

Beyond that, it’s important to regularly review compliance to confirm your organization understands what needs to be done and that you are following what is required.

Compliance reviews often prove to be a cost-saving and important step for small and medium-sized businesses.

Disaster & Recovery Planning

How does your organization respond to a disaster? Whether it’s a natural disaster, political upheaval, or cybersecurity breach, you need a plan of action to respond quickly and effectively.

Hopefully, you already have that plan in place. The end-of-year review then ensures that your plan is sufficient for your organization. If you find any gaps, you can update the plan as needed.

If you don’t have a disaster recovery plan, this review is a good chance to make room for the plan in your schedule and budget.

Budget

Speaking of budgets, you need to know what you spent the past year. You also need to know your spending plan for the coming year.

We’re focusing on IT today, but the organization as a whole should face a budget review each year. If you already have a general budget review, make sure IT is included. If not, it might be time to plan an annual budget review.

Future Planning

This is also a great time to stop and plan ahead. What do you hope to do over the next year? How does technology fit into that?

Answering these questions will help you reflect on the rest of the checklist. It can help you deal with missed items or ideas, and it will confirm that your organization is headed in a positive direction.

Most of all, while you are going through your IT checklist it is a great time to get in touch with your Omaha IT services provider. CoreTech will perform an annual planning session with you and create a technology roadmap and budget for the upcoming year. Contact us today!