End-of-December Checklist for When the Office Gets Really Quiet

Do the final two weeks of December get very quiet in your office? Here's a list of operational and strategic suggestions that you can whip through and get done in less than a morning. Presenting your End-of-December Checklist to close out the year and start 2024 right!

• Check batteries and UPSes, test as appropriate. This is one of those tasks that often falls through the cracks, and then we find out the hard way that our batteries are past their useful lives. If you have a DES Maintenance Agreement with equipment coverage, your battery-powered systems will be in good shape.

• Check on your software agreements and expiration dates. Granted, this is a morning of busy work, but you’ll thank us later. Mark those expiration dates on your 2024 calendar, before the new year and new budget begins, and you won’t be blindsided by expired licenses and costs for upgrades.

• Compare your lists of system users with your list of active employees. If your user lists aren’t governed by Active Directory or another integrated management system, you will undoubtedly catch and remove terminated employees from your systems. As you manually cross-reference your systems, you can craft the business case that, from a security posture and time management perspective, an integrated directory system should be on your 2024 wish list.

• Look back at your energy usage and set goals for the new year. Energy costs remain high, and still, not every company has really investigated their energy usage. Your 2024 budgets might look better if you can save some cash on electricity, natural gas and other resources. If you’re not sure how to do this, let’s talk about IoT.

• Has it been six months since you did a cybersecurity diagnostic? Vulnerabilities aren’t static – otherwise we’d catch them once and for all and call it a day. If you aren’t already doing a systematic review of your network security, we can provide a free cybersecurity threat assessment. It takes 7 days of monitoring after which we give you a report outlining malware on your systems and a breakdown of networking usage.

• Patch, patch, patch! Check to ensure you are receiving and applying all software and firmware patches from your various technology manufacturers. If you’ve lost track of how all of these updates are disseminated, check in with DES Support, or your sales representative, and schedule a checkup.