While everyone else dreams of eggnog and holiday parties, IT professionals know the festive season brings its own special brand of headaches: Cybercriminals. Unfortunately, these bad actors are always online, and they never take vacation days—if anything, they see the holidays as prime hunting season.
Photo: Mimi Thian / Unsplash
While everyone else dreams of eggnog and holiday parties, IT professionals know the festive season brings its own special brand of headaches: Cybercriminals. Unfortunately, these bad actors are always online, and they never take vacation days—if anything, they see the holidays as prime hunting season.
Thankfully, there are plenty of things you can do to stay off their radar. We spoke to a few providers offering quality managed IT support in Melbourne, San Francisco, and London. Below, you’ll find their best tips for keeping your systems secure while you enjoy some well-deserved time off:
Update Everything (Yes, Everything)
Those pending security patches won’t install themselves. Schedule comprehensive updates across all systems, applications, and firmware before the holiday lull. Nothing ruins a Christmas dinner quite like an emergency cybersecurity call between courses.
Pay special attention to remote access tools—they’re the keys to your kingdom, while everyone works from their in-laws’ houses.
Backup, Test, Repeat
If your backup strategy hasn’t been tested recently, now’s the time. Run full system backups and verify they actually work. The only thing worse than needing a backup is discovering your backup failed when you need it most.
Store copies offsite, and ensure your backup systems have enough capacity for the inevitable year-end data surge.
Tighten Access Controls
Review and revise access permissions across your network. Those temporary contractors from six months ago? Time to revoke their credentials. The intern who left in August? Probably doesn’t need admin access anymore. Think of it as digital spring-cleaning, except it’s winter and much more critical.
Set Up Enhanced Monitoring
Your security tools need to work overtime during the holidays. Configure alerts for unusual login patterns, large data transfers, or suspicious activities. While you’re watching holiday movies, your monitoring systems should be watching everything else.
Set thresholds that balance security with sanity—nobody wants their phone buzzing every time someone checks their email from grandma’s house.
If you’re not confident in managing these alerts yourself, consider hiring a reputable Managed Services Provider (MSP) to handle 24/7 remote monitoring for you over the holidays. The beauty of MSPs is that you can work with them ongoing or for one-off projects like this, making them highly cost-effective.
Document Emergency Procedures
If you’ll be operating with a skeleton staff over the holidays, create clear, step-by-step protocols for common emergencies. Your team shouldn’t need to decipher cryptic notes or rely on institutional knowledge that lives solely in your head.
Include contact information for key vendors, service providers, and that one person who somehow always knows how to fix the legacy system.
Prepare for Remote Support
Over the break, some of your team members might work from random locations with questionable Wi-Fi. To avoid issues, strengthen VPN configurations, test remote support tools, and prepare simple troubleshooting guides for common issues.
Someone will inevitably try to access sensitive data from a coffee shop in another timezone—make sure they can do it securely.
Schedule System Maintenance
Use the quiet period to run intensive maintenance tasks. Defragment databases, clear log files, and perform those system optimizations you’ve been postponing. Think of it as giving your infrastructure a spa day while everyone else is away.
If you’ll have people potentially logging on remotely, make sure everyone is aware of the maintenance schedule.
Plan for the Worst
Despite best efforts, things can go wrong. So establish a clear escalation path and rotation schedule for the holiday period. Define what constitutes a true emergency. For example, forgetting your password is not an emergency. A pop-up message demanding payment to unlock your computer most definitely is.
Create contingency plans for various scenarios, from ransomware attacks to natural disasters. Consider it your technical disaster advent calendar.
Bringing It All Together
Beyond these technical preparations, remember the human element. Brief your team on coverage schedules, emergency procedures, and acceptable response times. Set realistic expectations with management about service levels during the holiday period. Nobody should expect immediate responses to non-critical issues at 3 AM on New Year’s Eve.
Consider running a pre-holiday stress test. Take it a step further by simulating common failure scenarios and practice your response procedures. It’s better to find gaps in your planning while you’re fully staffed than during the holiday rush. Plus, it’s a great team-building exercise—nothing brings people together quite like controlled chaos.
Document any temporary changes or special arrangements made for the holiday period, including when they should be reversed. Create a post-holiday checklist to ensure temporary measures don’t become permanent security risks. The new year shouldn’t inherit the technical debt of the old one.
Our final piece of advice? Relax into the fact that perfect security doesn’t exist. What you’re aiming for is proper preparation that closes obvious gaps and prevents poor performance. A well-prepared infrastructure is the best gift you can give yourself and your team this holiday season. With these measures in place, you might actually get to enjoy that eggnog—but keep your phone charged, just in case.
