Backup Isn’t Enough: What the Holidays Can Teach Us About True Business Continuity
When the holidays arrive, the pace of business slows down—but for cybercriminals, it’s open season.
As offices empty out, staff take time off, and IT teams scale back, attackers seize the moment to exploit reduced oversight and slower response times.
In recent years, some of the most damaging breaches and ransomware incidents have happened during long weekends and holiday breaks. The reason is simple: fewer people watching means more opportunity to strike.
But while many businesses still rely on backups as their primary safety net, the truth is this — a backup won’t stop an attack, and it won’t keep your business running in real time.
Why the Holidays Are Prime Time for Cyberattacks
Threat actors are patient and strategic. They monitor network behavior and wait for the perfect window — and the holidays check every box:
- Reduced Staffing: With fewer IT and security personnel on duty, response time slows dramatically. Attackers know that alerts may go unseen for hours or even days.
- Delayed Patch Management: Many organizations postpone updates during busy year-end periods, leaving exploitable vulnerabilities open longer.
- Seasonal Scams: Holiday-themed phishing emails and fake delivery notifications surge, tricking both employees and customers into revealing credentials.
- Remote Access Risks: Staff working from home on unsecured networks or personal devices introduce easy entry points for attackers.
- Distraction & Burnout: Fatigued employees rushing to wrap up projects are more likely to click, approve, or overlook something they normally wouldn’t.
The False Sense of Security: Backups Alone Don’t Equal Continuity
It’s common for companies to assume, “We have backups—we’re safe.”
But backups only help after a breach or outage has already disrupted operations. In the meantime, downtime costs escalate, customers are impacted, and critical data may still be compromised.
True business continuity goes beyond saving data — it’s about ensuring that your entire organization can keep functioning when an incident occurs. That includes:
- Access to systems and applications.
- Secure communications and collaboration tools.
- The ability to serve customers and meet compliance requirements.
Key Lessons from the Holiday Threat Landscape
Here’s what the holiday season teaches us every year about resilience and risk:
- Speed Matters: Having data backed up is only useful if you can restore it fast enough. Measure your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) to ensure downtime doesn’t cripple your business.
- Know What You Can Afford to Lose: Define your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) — the maximum amount of data you can lose before it hurts operations.
- Segment and Secure Your Backups: Keep at least one offline or immutable backup separated from your main network to prevent ransomware from encrypting it.
- Automate Monitoring & Alerts: With fewer people available, automated detection tools can flag unusual activity and escalate incidents faster.
- Test Before You Rest: Schedule simulated recovery tests and incident response drills before your team goes on holiday.
How to Stay Secure This Holiday Season
- Harden Remote Access: Enforce MFA on all remote logins and disable unused VPN accounts before extended breaks.
- Pre-Schedule Patching: Apply critical updates early and verify system integrity before staff leave.
- Plan for Incident Response: Make sure key contacts are documented, reachable, and know their role in a security event.
- Communicate Expectations: Inform your team how to handle suspicious emails, after-hours alerts, or unusual login attempts.
- Document Continuity Procedures: From restoring servers to rerouting communications, ensure everyone knows what “Plan B” looks like.
The Bottom Line
Backups are a critical component of your security stack—but they’re not your shield.
During the holidays, when cybercriminals are most active and your defenses are at their thinnest, true business continuity is what determines whether your organization stumbles or stands strong.
As the season approaches, now is the time to test your response plans, review your recovery objectives, and strengthen your defenses—before the holidays give threat actors their favorite gift: an open door.
Book your free 30-minute Cybersecurity Assessment today. We’ll baseline your defenses, model third-party risks, and provide a custom 30-day action plan for your business.
