The holiday period is one of the worst times for IT incidents and one of the worst times to respond to them. Reduced IT staff, employees working from home networks and travel locations, and a surge in phishing campaigns targeting distracted users -- all at once. The organizations that make it through cleanly are the ones that prepare before the holiday window opens, not during it.
The Risk Profile Is Different This Time of Year
Holiday phishing campaigns are well-documented and predictable. Attackers know that users are distracted, that IT response times are slower, and that shipping notifications, HR benefit reminders, and year-end financial emails are all plausible lures. Security awareness training helps, but the more reliable protection is enforcing MFA on every remote access point so that credential theft alone does not produce a breach. If you have any remote access path that does not require MFA, close that gap before the holidays.
The second risk is capacity. If your organization uses VDI or VPN for remote access, the holiday period often brings unusual demand patterns -- more simultaneous sessions from non-standard locations, at non-standard hours. I have seen VDI environments that run fine under normal load hit resource ceilings when a significant portion of the workforce connects remotely at the same time. Audit your VDI resource capacity and scale ahead of the demand spike. Do not wait for the help desk calls.
What to Verify Before You Walk Out the Door
Backup coverage deserves specific attention. Scheduled backup jobs do not care that your monitoring team is at half-staff. Verify that backup jobs are running successfully, that alerts will reach someone who is actually available to respond, and that your recovery procedures work. If you have not tested a restore recently, the week before the holidays is a better time to find out than the week of.
Failover and disaster recovery procedures are the same story. Test them before the holiday window, not during it. If your failover process requires steps that only one person knows, document those steps before that person takes PTO. This is basic operational hygiene, but I have seen it missed at organizations that otherwise run tight operations.
Communication Prevents Help Desk Volume
Communicate clearly to users about support availability before the holidays start. Tell them who to contact, what the escalation path is, and what issues rise to the level of an after-hours call. Users who know what to expect generate fewer panic contacts. Users who cannot reach IT and do not know why generate a lot of them.
Set an out-of-office message on your IT support channels that includes the emergency contact path. It sounds obvious. It gets skipped more often than it should.
The Simple Truth About Holiday Incidents
The organizations that have serious problems over the holidays are almost always the ones that did not test anything beforehand and did not communicate anything to users. A few hours of preparation in the week before the break prevents a lot of weekend phone calls and a lot of Monday-morning cleanup. Preparation is the work. The holiday is supposed to be the break.