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IT Technicians know that anything that can go wrong will go wrong during December when most companies have shut down or are working on a skeleton staff. Unfortunately, cyber attackers also step up their activities during this period and look for innovative ways to disrupt business networks and critical infrastructure.

While Westech’s clients enjoy peace of mind from our remote teams assisting them with IT preparations before and support during the holiday season, there are some proactive steps that business executives and IT Managers can take to protect their companies against costly downtime, cyber and ransomware attacks before your IT team goes on leave.

Steps to Prepare Your IT Infrastructure

Analyse your resource needs to determine if they are still sufficient to carry the business through the holiday season and always ensure that there is enough of a buffer, especially in the case of an unexpected data surge. This can be achieved through automatic scaling and migrations.
Conduct rolling restarts on any servers or virtual machines that have high memories and require a clear out.
Ensure that your IT systems will remain stable by applying and testing any patches or updates in advance to avoid later issues.
Review your thresholds to ensure that they are adequately monitored and will not raise false alarms.
Use automatic failovers to diversify your infrastructure so that it can handle additional traffic, if necessary. Load balancing and failover rules should be properly tested.
Database files should be appropriately distributed to avoid bottlenecks.
Check bandwidth requirements and shut down any unnecessary synchronisation tasks.
Load and stress test your IT infrastructure. You can also implement or adjust traffic routing processes to provide a more resilient network.
Optimise your transactional coding wherever possible.
Avoid last-minute changes which haven’t been tested or implement a “change freeze”.
Check if your app workflows will fail if a third-party service provider fails and try to make these workflows as independent as possible.
Establish escalation protocols for the holiday period and thoroughly communicate these throughout the company.

It is essential to have a reliable IT technical team on call 24/7 during the festive season. Although you may have some of your IT Team on standby over this period, it is always worth having a backup IT Service Level Agreement with an experienced and professional IT company such as Westech.

We provide in-house or remote IT Support to maintain your IT infrastructure. Our flexible IT support and maintenance agreements will suit your pocket. To ensure that we provide the best IT support specific to your business, we conduct a full IT audit on your infrastructure, hardware, and software. This indicates what you have against what you need.

Book a meeting with us to find out how we can assist you with an IT Audit or an IT Service Level Agreement for the holiday period.

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