Long weekends and holiday breaks give your employees a much-needed break, but during this time, your IT infrastructure is unattended and vulnerable. Cybercriminals know this and see holidays as an opportunity to take advantage of empty offices.
Not only is the cyber risk higher during a holiday break, but the odds of other IT problems occurring also increase. Worse still, all of these incidents are more damaging, as a ransomware attack, failed backup, or server outage that begins at the start of the break can go days without being noticed.
Here are some tips to help prepare your IT environment before employees leave for a long weekend to reduce downtime, prevent data loss, and improve business continuity.
Keep your IT monitored while you are away
Continuous monitoring is one of the most important network protections during holiday downtime. Without active monitoring, your response time is slow. Small issues can quickly become serious incidents, and cyberattacks can permeate your entire network before anyone notices.
So before you send your team off for a long weekend, set your automated monitoring tools to watch your:
- Network activity
- Server health
- Failed login attempts
- Security alerts
- Backup status
- Cloud application activity
Check your settings to make sure critical notifications reach the correct people and that escalation procedures are current. If your risk is high or your break is going to be long, consider partnering with a managed IT services provider (MSP) and/or an outsourced security operations center (SOC). They can monitor your environment 24/7 and respond to threats immediately.
Ensure data backups are ready if anything happens
Reliable data backups are essential during holiday downtime because when you get back from a break, you need everything to work the way it did when you left.
If a cyberattack, hardware failure, or accidental deletion occurs while employees are away, backups may become your only path to starting business back up.
However, simply having backups is not enough. You must confirm they are working properly before the holiday begins.
Before your staff leaves, review:
- Backup completion reports
- Storage capacity
- Backup schedules
- Recovery testing results
- Offsite or cloud backup availability
If you have particularly sensitive systems that require stronger protection, consider immutable or isolated backups that cannot be modified by attackers. These backups protect your business if threats such as ransomware target connected storage systems.
You don’t want to discover backup failures only after you return, so do a thorough test before leaving. If you haven’t implemented automated data backups or aren’t sure how to perform a backup assessment, now is the perfect time to bring in an IT consultant to ensure your data stays protected. After all, you want to relax on your time off, not worry about your business collapsing because your data is gone.
Establish an incident response plan
Even with strong security protections, incidents can still happen. That’s why your business needs a clear incident response plan before employees leave for a holiday break.
An incident response plan outlines exactly what should happen if something like a cyberattack or system failure occurs in your network while you’re away. Without a plan, your response efforts will be delayed and disorganized, adding to the damage your business suffers.
Your response plan should identify:
- Who receives emergency alerts
- Which IT providers should be contacted
- Which systems are highest priority
- How employees communicate during outages
- When law enforcement or regulators must be notified
It is also important to define decision-making authority ahead of time. Establish the chain of command so that if your senior leadership is unavailable during a holiday, your team knows who can approve emergency actions.
Finally, communicate expectations clearly to employees before the holiday starts. Staff should know how to report suspicious emails, security alerts, or lost devices even while away from the office.
Inform your managed IT services provider
MSPs like outsourceIT provide 24/7/365 monitoring and support, even when everyone else is on holiday. Still, if you partner with an MSP, you should communicate your planned absences with them so they are ready for the added risk and monitoring requirements.
If you need a reliable MSP to secure your IT network before a long holiday and keep an eye on things while you’re gone, contact outsourceIT. We’ll protect your systems and data when they are most vulnerable, and enable your team to jump right back into maximum productivity when they return.
