Small Business Tech Tips

It’s that time of year again.

For everyone in the US who lives outside of Hawaii, Arizona and most of Indiana, it’s time to reclaim that hour you gave up in the spring.

For me, I’ve always enjoyed the weekend we “fall back” because I could get an extra hour of sleep without feeling guilty. It’s always been one of the most laid back of weekends and that extra hour has usually come in handy.

Of course there is the responsibility of making sure that all of your clocks and watches are changed – even the ones in the car. I fondly remember one year when the receptionist at my office showed up a whole hour early on the Monday after falling back. She dutifully proceeded to do her morning routine. About twenty minutes into it, I walked up to her and asked her why she was in so early and she didn’t understand what I meant. I reminded her that Daylight Savings Time had ended and told her that she had shown up an hour early since it wasn’t 8:20 AM but rather 7:20 AM. She turned to me and said “So that’s why the daycare people looked at me like I was crazy.”

Every year we go through the routine of “springing” our clocks forward an hour and “falling” back that same hour in the fall. For years we did the latter the weekend before Halloween, but about four years ago the powers that be pushed the weekend of extra sleep back a week to the first weekend in November. They also messed with the weekend we “spring forward” but that’s fodder for another article.

That year all the Blackberry’s and Outlook clients were completely hosed if they weren’t patched (updated) properly. By now, most of those issues are a thing of the past.

However, it’s helpful to make use of the extra hour to some extent. For example, some people use this weekend as a reminder to change all the batteries in their smoke alarms. Here are some tips for you to use on this weekend in your business:

1. Check for updates to your firewall – new threats to your computers, data and business are coming out daily. If you don’t actively mange your firewall use this weekend as a reminder to do so. After all, once a year is better than never.
2. Check your server’s free space on its OS partition (i.e. drive C:). If you have less than 10% available then clean it out.
3. Run your server’s manufacturer’s diagnostic tools and take actions it recommends
4. Check for software and driver updates on your server.  - Same logic as #1. New threats come out all the time and Microsoft and Apple update their server OSes often. If you don’t apply these updates at least do that this weekend.
5. Check your server’s event logs. If you see any errors, address these.

Of course, Everon’s monitoring services will take care of most of the above for you and you should really do these more often than once per year.

This year the weekend we change our clocks is November 5/6. Most of your electronic clocks that are date aware will make the change for you (i.e. DVRs, laptops, mobile phones etc.) but those clocks that are not, such as your microwave, car, alarm clock, some fax machines or watches are not and will need to be adjusted as well.

So remember, enjoy the extra weekend hour but use this weekend as a reminder to protect your business on November 6th. After all, you don’t want to show up too early to the office on Monday morning and you certainly don’t want to be hacked.

-Jim DeVico

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Read more by: Jim De Vico

Tags: 2011, Daylight savings, time

This entry was posted on Monday, October 24th, 2011 at 10:16 am and is filed under Small Business Management Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.