7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE IT PROS

The PC Pro team combine their collective wisdom to create seven tips for keeping on top of your IT game

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1 Think long term – Jon Honeyball

Short-term thinking is the absolute enemy of effective working. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve completed a firewall audit, only to find an incoming route punched through the firewall because the CEO wanted to run some weird software from home for a weekend. And that was two years ago, and yet nobody has gone back and plugged the hole.

Dropping that cheap switch into the network because the cable wasn’t long enough is fine as a short-term fix – until this becomes a major route of traffic through your office. And the cleaner unplugs it to get the vacuum to work.

How many times have there been servers collecting dust under the desk that someone has forgotten about? Or a virtual machine hosting a mission-critical infrastructure component, and yet nobody knows what it does, who owns it, or what the login credentials are? Or when it was last patched? Or even who was responsible for this process, because Fred left two years ago and you’re sure he was the one who knew. Or was it Michelle?

It’s imperative to have an active hardware replacement process. Hardware breaks all the time. Keeping something running just because it hasn’t broken yet is absolutely not the risk profile analysis that helps you when it does actually die. This might be tomorrow, next week or in two years’ time, but it will break.