Watch Out for that Bus!!!

Is your IT contractor or employee allowed to go on vacation? Can you fire your IT personnel if they are a bad employee? Do you worry that the only person that has the keys to the kingdom has just left the country for his/her honeymoon? Do you know if your IT personnel gets hit by a bus that your domain name is still yours?

A business owner should know the answer to these questions.

Now don't freak out. These things all need to be addressed sooner rather than later but there is no fire.

Here are the basics of being responsible with your IT information. You cannot possibly understand all of the things your IT staff is telling you at all times. That is OK. You have figured out that you need to know the big picture and your IT staff is going to help get you there. However you need to have the information that is vital to your companies IT infrastructure. You would not let your accountant run without books why should your IT department be any different?

Passwords
As a business owner or manager you must have either a password safe or a spreadsheet that has all of the passwords for all things related to your company on file. The IT staff should update that list every time a new username or password is created. e.g. Administrator accounts, Vendors, servers, printers, related websites and domain registrars. (With the obvious exception of user accounts that change on a regular basis.)

I have two clients right now that do not have ownership of their own domain name. Their IT consultant at the time setup their domain name and made themselves the owner and the technical contact. Now we are going through the process of getting the domain ownership transferred over to the owner of the company. It is not likely that the IT consultant would do something malicious to the domain name now that you no longer work together. It is more likely that when it comes time to renew the domain that it won't get renewed. When you call up the domain registrar and tell them your website is down they will tell you that they cannot talk to you because you are not the owner of the domain.

Solutions:
Domain registrars allow three types of contacts. Owner, billing and technical. Make sure the IT staff sets up as many contacts as possible. Make sure those vendor services are registered to someone in the company.

In the event that an IT employee or contractor is leaving for a long vacation or leaving for good make sure to pay them to write put together a list of passwords and all things IT if they don't already have one.

Hardware Inventory
A hardware inventory is needed to help keep track of depreciation, location of equipment, warranty status and serial numbers.

Network Diagram
An inventory of the network can easily be combined with the hardware inventory. This is the map of your network. This will tell you the IP addresses of the printers, servers, firewalls, routers and DHCP scope.

Vendor Contact Information
This will save you and your company a lot of time when there are problems. When the T1 goes down you need to know who to call right away. They are going to ask you questions about your circuit ID and account numbers. That information should be compiled for each vendor in an easy to read list.

Solutions Documentation
Your IT staff should have a document or a ticketing system to write down solutions to major or chronic issues. There are free solutions like Spiceworks (www.spiceworks.com) and paid for tracking solutions. Or a simple spreadsheet can be created to keep up with these problems and solutions.

Conclusion
Documentation, Documentation and Documentation. Documentation will allow you to sleep at night, delegate projects to new employees, allow IT personnel to take a vacation and have the IT services run a bit more smoothly.

If you need any assistance with any of the things above feel free to contact us.

Adam Bell
Sublime Computer Services
We make your technology work

615-942-0850
www.sublimecomp.com
adam@sublimecomp.com