Make sure your systems are up-to-date and work smoothly to keep employees / customers ready for work in the new year.
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As system administrators, we are responsible for the ongoing management and management of computer equipment for employees / customers – whether these are stand-alone computers connected directly to the LAN, mobile devices for teleworkers or a real army of tablets and smartphones connected via the WAN public Wi-Fi networks or especially dubious hotspots.
SEE: Network administrators: a guide (free PDF) (TechRepublic)
The start of a new year is the best time to ensure that all your ducks are in a row. Below is a list of 10 checklist items that must be executed to ensure that your systems are ready for 2020.
1. Check whether the disaster recovery plans work
Disaster recovery plans work right? This belief is often confused, but the real test is the response to a disaster. If disaster recovery plans do not work, there is still time to correct them for a major incident. If there is no effective disaster recovery plan, there is no time like the present to start that conversation.
2. Implement operating system upgrades
This is by far one of the simplest tasks to perform, given the multitude of available software applications. Mobile devices or devices that communicate via less-than-ideal connections will take some extra effort to complete successfully. By giving your customers new systems for the new year, they get a little extra boost in their step.
3. Order service material and replacement parts
Scheduling an appointment for a service request or ordering replacement parts for defective parts or parts that are likely to fail will save you time.
Some service contracts build in vendor visits to review equipment and determine if there are problems – a type of engine check by a certified technician. If problems are found, the supplier can often facilitate the maintenance of these devices quickly and efficiently with little IT involvement, allowing them to concentrate on other tasks.
4. Check the status and performance of the server
Similar to item three above – except more critical – is to perform a health check on the servers that serve the services used by the company. The most important things to look out for are warnings about possible hardware errors, loss of services, and resource use. The latter goes double in virtualized environments where resources can be configured based on their physical server counterparts, often resulting in over-provisioning of resources that remain under-utilized.
The reverse of this scenario is a server that no longer has resources and is not stable. Too many or too few sources produce only one result: some servers on the road are not configured correctly and do not work optimally.
5. Perform preventive maintenance
Preventive maintenance is one of those tasks that – depending on the layout of your organization – you may be too busy to do or you think it is below your wage level. Examples of this are cleaning the computers with a can of compressed air to prevent dust formation and the use of specialized solvents to “rid” keyboards and mice of functionality and service life. Regardless of where it falls on your spectrum, there are a number of preventive care tasks that can be performed by a number of people at all levels; this type of care can extend the life of your devices.
6. Update license agreements
This may seem like another silly task, but it is an important IT related task. License management can have serious consequences for business results if it is not checked. Developers enjoy the financial benefits of using their software and any violation can lead to high fines.
Conducting due diligence to assess current and anticipated usage on all devices, including the sometimes tricky licensing structures for virtualized copies based on CPU counts, is just the tip of the iceberg. Remember to take into account OS upgrades and device support agreements, including firmware updates and the like. An updated inventory of license records can also better manage IT financing in the future, especially if virtualization of servers and client desktops can reduce license usage and save money that can be redirected to other expenses.
SEE: Is your data policy ready for the new consumer privacy law in California? (TechRepublic)
7. Ensure that monitoring tools are updated
The greater the footprint, the greater the chance that the organization will use some form of monitoring tools. Regardless of whether it is licensed or with an open source, the servers and workstations used to monitor and manage clients must be regularly updated for maximum protection and stability. There is no better time than the present to perform these tasks to verify that all management systems are optimized and work efficiently.
8. Perform hardware inventory and system status reports
A concise hardware inventory helps IT know where systems are located, while the system status check helps determine the status of these nodes, whether they are missing updates or require a modification or hardware replacement.
9. Analyze log output for hidden problems
All devices generate logs and it is impossible for IT to read through every log on every device, otherwise we will never get anything done. Fortunately for us, syslog servers exist, and their job is to correlate all these logs in one central location and sort the entries to determine which are critical and therefore must be executed immediately and on which registered items a minor then-immediate response is required.
Information from log files can also inform IT about how the new year should proceed. In combination with other reporting types, a larger, more holistic view of the network can provide insight into future management tasks to be focused on and projects to be pursued.
SEE: 5 important tasks for G Suite administrators (TechRepublic)
10. Perform patch and change management
This should be a no-brainer. Patch management, updates, hotfixes, whatever you call it, must be performed regularly and according to a controlled method to have some degree of verifiable success. This can be difficult in larger companies where patches must be tested for a certain period of time before they are deployed in the production environment. This causes downtime for end users.
Always perform a thorough testing phase and work on time to confirm patch implementation on all devices. You must also include detailed change management documentation to identify changes and keep track of when they occur in the case of regression tests or future problems are noticed during subsequent patch management cycles.
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