The holidays are coming.

During this period, you will find most offices empty as most go on year end leave. IT, however, still has to run and be maintained.

So how do IT professionals keep their IT running during the holidays?

Chua Koon Teck, technical consultant at AsiaTel, said in jest, that one should just cross fingers and pray for best.

However, jokes aside, IT professionals like Mr Ng Gim Siong, managing director of Cypress Computing noted that while the environment for IT infrastructure are unique to each corporation, there should be common basic steps in place for IT professionals to keep their IT running during the holidays.

“Before leaving for the holidays, IT professionals should do a IT health check to ensure there is no hardware error and the backup is running fine,” said Mr Ng.

“Power for unused devices should also be switched off when one goes for long holidays. This is to prevent any unnecessary power surge during a power failure.”

For Trent Payne, owner and technical lead at TrentQuailty Software, it is important to check for “free space” before leaving for the holidays.

“IT teams should ensure that disk partitions are in no risk of imminently running out of space,” shared Mr Payne.

Tan Zhi Sheng, pre-sales engineer at Originex (Singapore) Pte Ltd, suggested a network freeze before, during and immediately after the holidays.

“Management should impose a network freeze where no new devices are added before, during and immediately after the holidays,” advised Mr Tan.

“This will prevent any issues from cropping up when new devices are added.”

If you are an IT professional, do you have any tips to keep your IT running during the holidays?