How
"We'll
Deal
With
It
Later"
Turns
Into
A
Summer
IT
Emergency

Deferred maintenance and thin summer staffing are a bad combination. Here is how to get ahead of it.

Summer is when the deferred things come due. The server that has been making a noise since February, the certificate expiring in August, the backup job that has been failing quietly since someone changed a password. All of it lands in the weeks when half the team is on holiday and the person who knows how it works is unreachable.

The pattern we see every year

Something breaks that would have been a minor job in March. It is now urgent, the usual engineer is away, and the person covering has never seen that system. What should have been an hour becomes two days.

What to do before it happens

Write down who covers what while people are away, and make sure that person has the access to actually do it. Check expiry dates on certificates, domains and licences that fall in the next three months. Confirm a restore works, not just that the backup ran. And clear the small deferred jobs now, while they are still small.