As 2018 winds down, forward-thinking IT professionals are tackling maintenance chores, assessments, and tune-up tasks to prepare for the year ahead. This ebook offers a collection of practical tips to help you handle the most critical end-of-year jobs—from updating firmware to replacing batteries to reviewing budget performance.

From the ebook:

If you’re an IT person still at work while many people are away on vacation, it’s a great time to catch up on all sorts of maintenance tasks that are often overlooked.

The obvious tasks to do are things like updating passwords, turning on two-factor authentication, updating and scanning for malware, experimenting with network setting optimizations, patching systems, clearing browser data, and reviewing and removing old or unused files.

If you get tired of reviewing your security policies, try the following tasks to keep your organization’s systems running smoothly.

Update firmware

Check for firmware updates to hardware, especially:

• Routers
• Firewalls
• Switches
• Wi-Fi devices
• Printers
• Scanners

While most companies patch servers, desktops, and mobile devices regularly, the above devices are often overlooked.

Refresh Wi-Fi settings
You might also update Wi-Fi network settings for your access points for both employee devices and guests. Depending on your setup, push the updates automatically to employee devices, or ask employees and guests to update their settings. Also, change the administrative password for your access points or, at the very least, make sure the settings are something other than the manufacturer defaults. (It still amazes me how often I find Wi-Fi devices with the manufacturer’s default settings configured.)