The holiday period is one of the busiest times of the year for cybercriminals, and one of the quietest for small and medium businesses. With fewer staff online, slower response times, and reduced monitoring, cyber threats know this is the perfect time of year to strike.
In fact, national cyber reports consistently show a seasonal spike in phishing, fraudulent logins, and account compromise attempts between December and January. And without the right protections in place, even a small incident can turn into a major disruption while your team is off enjoying a well-deserved break.
The guide we’ve created below walks you through a practical, business-friendly checklist to help keep your IT security systems well-managed during the holiday shutdown.
1. Review User Access & Passwords
Typically, your business will go through changes throughout the year, and your user access should too. Before you close the office, take time to tighten your account security by:
- Disabling old accounts for past employees, contractors, or temporary staff.
- Enforcing MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) across all critical systems (Microsoft 365, CRM, finance platforms, and remote access).
- Checking holiday temp access controls if you use short-term admin or support staff. Ensure they only have the access they truly need.
2. Secure All Devices
Whether your staff take devices home or they remain in the office, you want to ensure their devices and systems are protected. Make sure that laptop lock policies are enforced (strong passwords, auto-lock timers, no shared logins), and mobile device management (Microsoft Intune) is enabled, so devices can be remotely wiped, controlled, or restricted if misplaced. A lost laptop or unsecured phone can quickly become a data breach.
3. Check Backups & Recovery
The last thing you want when you’re away on holiday, enjoying your time off, is to discover your backups aren’t working and an IT breach has occurred. So, before you take a break:
- Test your restores – make sure data can actually be recovered.
- Confirm retention to ensure backups cover the timeframe you expect.
- Ensure offsite or cloud backups are healthy and synchronising correctly.
Backups are only valuable if they work when you need them. Testing is what makes this possible.
4. Enable 24/7 Monitoring & Alerts
With no one actively in the office (or a skeleton team managing operations), detection is vital. Automated, continuous monitoring helps stop threats early, even when your staff are offline and can help you catch:
- Suspicious logins
- MFA bypass attempts
- Privilege escalations
- Malware or ransomware behaviour
- System failures or outages
If you don’t already have round-the-clock monitoring, now is the time to put it in place.
5. Communicate an Escalation Plan
If a serious issue does occur during the break, does everyone know what to do? It’s important to ensure your key people understand their responsibilities, you have a clear on-call structure, all emergency contact details are up-to-date, and your IT partner knows your closure dates and who to contact should the need occur. A good escalation plan keeps small issues from snowballing whilst you and/or your team are away over the holiday season.
6. Final Holiday IT Tips
A few final checks can go a long way in keeping your business secure, such as:
- Remind your team of safe email habits (phishing increases during holiday sales and travel seasons).
- Review supplier access – old or excessive vendor permissions are a major holiday risk.
- Ensure all critical systems are updated before closing up for the season.
Prepare Before You Switch Off
If you’re unsure whether your business is fully protected for the upcoming holiday break, now is the perfect time to act.
If you require assistance, you can book a pre-holiday IT readiness audit with our team at IQPC. We’ll review your backups, monitoring, access control and disaster recovery settings so you can enjoy the break with confidence. Get in touch today.
