He says it's also a good time to review user accounts and make sure that all access has been denied for students, staff and faculty that are no longer at the college. "We've streamlined our systems to use ActiveDirectory as the single point of identity," he says. ActiveDirectory allows his team to manage access for e-mail, remote users, network users, ERP systems and other critical applications. "If we had five places to manage identity, we'd have a greater risk of not being able to lock down our systems," he says.

5. Audit, audit, audit

Both Moeller and Gossels say auditing should be a built-in part of any IT team's to-do list.

For Moeller, auditing means making sure that all computers are running licensed software. "With less activity on the network, now is a good time to check that all your applications are legitimate," he says.

He says he gets very granular with his network auditing, even looking at MP3 files to make sure they are legal.