Like many businesses, Gen-i will be operating with reduced staff over the Christmas period – hopefully to enjoy a hot Kiwi summer.

There is a chance, however, that your customers have a different holiday period to you, some of your staff may need to work through, or might get called in to work unexpectedly.

With this in mind here are 5 things to think about before you turn on the ‘out of office’:

• Are your staff setup to cope with lost mobile phones, tablets and laptops? The silly season could result in devices being lost, stolen or ‘accidentally’ dropped into drinks at bars. Make sure your staff know how to backup their data, report lost devices and source replacements.

• December is a good time to minimise any changes to your environment, just in case something breaks over the holidays. We have a strict ‘brown out’ period from 20 December to 14 January for this reason – so keep that in mind if you need any changes to services we provide to you.

• Now is also a good time to check that your backups are working AND that you can restore from them. Work done before Christmas could be very hard to recreate after a long break...

• Setup and/or test remote access, so that you don’t have to come in to work for an urgent task that could be done on the beach. And make sure you register for the Telecom WiFi hotspots, so you can get 1GB of free internet access per day – but be sure to use it mostly for play, not work.

• If your password expires (which is good security policy), remember to reset it before you go on holiday (unless you would like a convenient excuse to ignore your email, of course).

By David Reiss, propositions manager, Gen-i