The festive season has a way of bending normal routines. Offices are quieter, teams are smaller, and working days feel shorter and more scattered. Systems, however, do not take a holiday. Networks keep routing traffic, cloud services keep running, and users still rely on your technology, even if they are working reduced hours or from holiday destinations.
The gap between a quieter office and a very active IT estate can create problems in the first full week of January. That is when everyone comes back, opens their laptops at once, and expects everything to work flawlessly.
A simple post-holiday IT reset can make the difference between a calm, focused start to the year and a week of unnecessary firefighting. Here are five practical checks that are worth doing before everyone returns.
Confirm that backups really work, not just that they are scheduled
Backups are only useful if you can restore from them. After a busy year and a patchwork of changes, it is easy to assume that “the backup is running” means “we are safe”. The holiday period is a good time to verify that assumption.
For your reset, aim to:
- Check that your backup jobs for key systems completed successfully over the festive period
- Run at least one test restore for a critical workload, for example a finance database, an important shared folder or a virtual machine
- Restore a Microsoft 365 item such as a mailbox, folder or SharePoint file to prove that cloud data is recoverable
- Make sure backup storage has enough free space for the next few weeks
You do not need to test every system, but you should prove that the process works from end to end. If restoring a small item is painful, restoring a full system under pressure will be worse.
Review holiday alerts and clear slow burning issues
Even if there were no headline outages in December, your monitoring tools probably saw things that are worth attention. Warnings about disk space, intermittent connectivity, high CPU usage or failing services often show up as “noise” and then quietly disappear into the background.
A post-holiday reset is the right moment to ask:
- Which alerts repeated through the break, even if they did not trigger incidents
- Whether any links, servers or applications flirted with capacity limits
- Whether there were unusual authentication attempts or sign in anomalies
- Which devices or locations generated the most noise
The goal is not to produce a glossy report. The goal is to identify patterns. A recurring warning today is often next quarter’s outage unless you address it. Treat the holiday period as a stress test that your monitoring has already observed.
Check capacity for the January ramp up
Usage patterns in December are strange. Some systems are busier than ever. Others are quieter than at any other time in the year. January looks different again. People return, projects restart, and new initiatives come online.
Before that ramp up, it helps to take a quick look at capacity:
- Internet and WAN links: were any circuits close to saturation, and are they ready for full staff load
- Wi Fi: did access points in busy locations struggle under the weight of guests and holiday traffic
- Storage: are key file systems, databases and virtualisation clusters getting close to capacity
- Core applications: did any line of business systems run “hot” during the holidays in a way that might worsen under normal office use
This does not need a full redesign. Sometimes a minor upgrade, a bandwidth change, or a small configuration adjustment is all that is required to smooth out January.
Re validate security controls after staff travel
Holiday travel changes the risk profile. Staff connect from new locations, use personal devices more often, and may have accepted prompts or pop ups quickly just to “get something done” before going back to family time.
Once people return, it is worth tightening the security screws again. Your reset should check that:
- Multi factor authentication is still properly enforced on all critical systems
- Endpoint protection is healthy and up to date on laptops and desktops that left the office
- VPN and remote access policies still match what you intended, not what was convenient in the moment
- Any unusual login activity during the break has been reviewed and explained
It is also a good opportunity to send a short internal note reminding staff to report anything that looked odd while they were away, for example unexpected prompts, consent screens, or strange emails they were unsure about at the time.
Tidy up temporary access and holiday workarounds
In the run up to the holidays, it is very common to grant temporary access “just for now”. A contractor needs a quick login. A skeleton crew member needs extra rights. A shared password is used in a rush. Those temporary changes have a habit of becoming permanent.
The post-holiday reset is the ideal time to close those doors:
- Remove accounts created for short term cover that are no longer needed
- Roll back any extra privileges given to users for holiday support
- Disable generic or shared accounts that were used as a quick fix
- Document any manual workarounds that staff relied on so you can design something more robust later
This clean up step is one of the simplest ways to reduce your attack surface without buying new tools.
A post-holiday IT reset is not about grand gestures. It is about a handful of small, disciplined actions that give you a more stable platform for the rest of the year.
If you:
- Prove that backups work
- Learn from holiday alerts and near misses
- Check that capacity will support the January ramp up
- Re confirm your security basics
- Clean up temporary access and short cuts
then your first full week back is far more likely to feel steady and controlled.
The benefit is simple. Your teams can focus on customers, projects and growth, instead of spending the start of 2026 sorting out issues that could have been quietly resolved before everyone returned.
Contact us if you would like a partner who helps you start 2026 with a stable, resilient IT platform instead of more firefighting.