· By Nicholas “Nick” O'Sullivan, Townsville
Before the holiday shutdown: a practical technology checklist
The office may close for the holidays, but email, websites, cloud accounts and payment requests keep arriving. Before the last person leaves, make sure someone knows what needs attention, which services must stay running and who can authorise a response.
Our recommendation is to start this review early enough to fix the gaps. The checklist applies to small businesses, charities, churches and community organisations, including teams with reduced staffing rather than a full shutdown.
Give each essential task an owner and a deputy
Confirm who will review urgent service alerts, failed backups and security notifications, and when they will do it. Agree cover with the people involved. Check suppliers’ actual support arrangements and escalation contacts; a subscription or support address alone does not establish around-the-clock response coverage.
Keep the contact list and short response instructions available securely outside the systems you may need help recovering. Test the alternate communication route. Our sister business’s Microsoft outage guide explains why email and chat can fail together.
Check access before the usual administrator goes away
- Remove access that is no longer needed for departing staff, volunteers and contractors.
- Confirm the people providing cover have their own authorised accounts and working MFA.
- Check emergency access arrangements without sharing the usual administrator’s password.
- Review temporary remote access and set an expiry or review date.
- Confirm who can renew domains, hosting and essential subscriptions if a billing problem occurs.
Test a recovery, then check what stays switched on
A backup notification is useful evidence of a job completing; a restore test checks whether you can recover the information. Arrange a controlled test before leave starts and record unresolved issues. This file-level restore guide is a starting point; business applications and servers need an appropriate test with the responsible administrator.
List the systems that need to remain available: backup devices, networking, phones, cameras, remote access and scheduled jobs may depend on equipment in an otherwise empty office. Agree which devices can be shut down and who can bring them back safely. Include building access and any power or environmental dependencies in the handover.
ASD’s cloud shared-responsibility guidance is a reminder to check what your organisation remains responsible for, including access and recovery, even when the software is hosted elsewhere.
Keep payment checks working when staff are away
Agree who can approve payments and who can act as an authorised backup approver. Keep the normal verification step for changed bank details: use a known, independently held contact number rather than the number in the change request. An urgent message or a familiar display name should not bypass that process.
ASD’s small-business threat guidance highlights unexpected requests involving payments, account changes or urgent action. A clear holiday handover helps staff know whom to ask when a request feels unusual.
Tell customers what to expect
Update opening hours, website notices, voicemail and relevant out-of-office messages with the closure dates and the working route for urgent enquiries. Avoid publishing unnecessary details about who has administrator access or exactly when premises are unattended. Check that enquiry forms still reach someone who is covering the break.
Leave a short record for reopening
Record planned changes, outstanding issues and decisions made during the closure. On return, review alerts and backup results, reconcile urgent requests, remove temporary access and confirm routine tasks have resumed. Schedule non-urgent changes when someone is available to test and support them; urgent security fixes still need a risk-based decision rather than an automatic delay until January.
Use our free incident response plan to document contacts and first actions, then test it with the people providing cover. If responsibilities are unclear, a fixed-scope technology review can help organise the work before the break. Any ongoing monitoring or support cover needs its own explicit agreement.
