The last weeks of the year are quiet for a reason. Decisions slow down, budgets close and Jan. 1 renewals arrive with little notice. Most organizations use December to coast. The ones that start the new year with leverage use it to look.
We recommend every client run a year-end technology review. It isn’t a project. It’s a few focused hours with the right people and the right questions. Here are the seven we start with.
1. What renews in the next 12 months, and when is the notice deadline?
Build one list of every technology contract, its renewal date and its notice period. Start with the largest contracts and anything renewing in the next six months. If the only way you learn about a renewal is a changed invoice, you’ve already lost your best negotiating window.
2. Are we paying for things we don’t use?
Look for licenses assigned to people who left, mobile lines nobody answers, circuits at sites you closed and tools that overlap after an acquisition. None of these show up as problems. They show up as line items, every month.
3. When did anyone last benchmark our pricing?
Contracts signed several years ago may not reflect what the market charges today. If no one has compared your pricing and terms against current options in the last three years, put it at the top of the 2027 list.
4. If our main connection failed tomorrow morning, what happens?
Ask it site by site. Does each location have backup internet that fails over automatically? Has anyone tested it? Wireless and cellular options now make backup practical at sites where a second wired circuit never made financial sense.
5. Could we pass our next cyber insurance renewal or audit without scrambling?
Insurers and auditors ask about the same controls: multifactor authentication, 24/7 monitoring, tested backups and an incident response plan. Answer the questionnaire now, before it arrives. The Identity Theft Resource Center found that multifactor authentication adoption among small businesses dropped to 27.2% in 2025, from 33.6% the year before. Don’t assume yours is turned on everywhere. Check.
6. How fast could we recover, and when did we last prove it?
A recovery plan that hasn’t been tested is a hope, not a plan. Write down how long it would take to be fully running after a ransomware event, then schedule a test in the first quarter to find out whether that number is real.
7. What are we still running that nobody thinks about?
Every organization has technology that works quietly until it doesn’t: copper phone lines for fire alarms, elevators and fax; on-premises phone systems at a single site; firewalls past end of support; mobile plans each department buys on its own. List them. Then decide which ones need a plan before they make the decision for you.
Who should be in the room
IT, finance, operations and whoever signs the contracts. Each sees a different part of the picture. Finance knows what you pay. IT knows what you run. Operations knows what breaks.
What to do with the answers
Sort what you find into three groups:
- Act now: renewals inside six months and any security gap an insurer or auditor will ask about.
- Plan for the first quarter: pricing benchmarks, consolidation and recovery testing.
- Watch: everything else, with a date to revisit it.
Get a head start
You don’t have to start from a blank page. The Convergent Technology Snapshot takes about five minutes. Answer a short set of questions and get a scored view of your contracts, network, security, voice and recovery, plus the top findings worth acting on before 2027 locks in. It covers most of the questions above and gives you a scored starting point for your review.