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How to Protect Your Business from Holiday Downtime

Picture of Gennifer Biggs

It won't be long until holiday music fills the air and gift shopping dominates weekend plans. For small to mid-sized businesses (SMB), those days between Labor Day and New Year's Day are priceless when it comes to a successful year. In fact, research from Constant Contact shows 50% of SMBs get at least 1/4 of their annual revenue from holiday shoppers, and that number jumps to 73% for retail SMBs.​

For small businesses with so much riding on sales in those last three months of the year, the holiday season can be stressful—cyber attacks on the rise, scams discouraging online shopping, flu and cold season creating employee shortages, and potential IT issues causing unexpected outages.

What does all of this have to do with managed services? One of the biggest benefits of working with an MSP is proactively planning for holiday downtime risks such as these and putting into action all the IT pieces to help protect holiday profits. We can't eliminate all the potential for disruption, but we can help your team prepare for worst-case scenarios—and craft a business continuity plan for the holiday season that will pay off all year. Plus, a reputable managed IT services provider offers the same monitoring and support during the holidays as it does the rest of the year, providing a safety net for your SMB.

Key Takeaways

  • Holiday downtime can cost SMBs big — from lost sales to damaged customer trust.
  • A proactive managed IT services provider helps prevent outages, cyberattacks, and staffing disruptions.
  • Business continuity planning before Q4 ensures seamless operations during peak revenue months.

The Business Continuity Challenge During Holidays

With the important role played by holiday sales, including the opportunity to capture first-time shoppers, having seamless customer service during the last quarter of the year is crucial for most small businesses—from restaurants to retail shops to specialty stores. Unfortunately, even a short disruption in services—malfunctioning point-of-sale equipment, website outage, staffing shortages, or delayed shipments—can cost a small business a sale, or even a customer. With 87% of consumers more likely to revisit a small business after buying from it during the holidays, delivering a positive customer experience during this peak shopping season is critical.

In the rush of holiday shopping, longer response times, missing items, or long lines can be catastrophic. Add to that the increased activity of hackers trying to hold your business hostage or steal valuable data, and your business could be in real trouble.

Your MSP will work proactively with you to brainstorm about potential gaps in your cybersecurity posture, as well as testing and refining your business continuity plans. While no one can predict bad weather or cyber attack timing, your MSP can help you reduce the impact with hardware and network redundancy, proactive IT monitoring and maintenance, and a clear plan for restoring your systems if the worst happens—all geared toward lessening the impact of unexpected situations and getting your business running smoothly as quickly as possible.

Why Holiday Cyber Threats Spike

Why is there such a focus on cybersecurity during the holidays? The reasons are numerous:

  • Hackers exploit gaps in monitoring during long weekends.
  • People are more likely to click social-engineered offers and deals as they shop for good buys.
  • Ransomware attacks are timed for maximum disruption, often leaving business networks exposed for longer.
  • Website traffic soars, an invitation to bad actors to steal data, hijack sites, or spoof shipping and payment emails unnoticed.

As businesses with small staff work feverishly to meet customer needs, it can be easier for a hacker to breach a network and sneak around undetected for longer. Plus, with emails, shipping notices, and online deals flying around, it can be simple to lure a customer into an ill-fated click and siphon valuable data without raising any red flags.

Because hackers know all this, they plan for the holiday rush just like retail outlets, making it all the more difficult for small businesses to protect themselves.

Why Holiday Spending is Key to Nearly All Verticals

Business owners outside of the retail and hospitality industries can overlook how important Q4 revenue can be, and the surge in spending across nearly all segments. Don't lull yourself into a false sense of security by thinking that hackers and unexpected downtime only hit stores and restaurants in the wallet. Consider this:

  • Revenue timing and cash flow stress: Many non-retail businesses (like seasonal service providers, contractors, and professional services) benefit from end-of-year budgets being released, extra client projects, or holiday contracts — meaning they experience a "rush" period where work volume and revenue expectations cluster before year-end.
  • Marketing & client engagement peaks: Even B2B or service companies run holiday promotions, year-end offers, or loyalty incentives. Because consumers and businesses alike are "in the buying mindset," the last quarter becomes a prime time to convert prospects or upsell.
  • Competitor dynamics & visibility: All businesses — not just retail — compete for attention at year-end. If your service firm doesn't maintain uptime, responsiveness, or security during this time, client attrition or negative reputation risk grows.
  • Support & operational strain: Service-oriented companies often reduce staff over holidays or manage skeleton crews. That makes them more exposed to downtime, emergencies, or service gaps — reinforcing the need for backup, monitoring, and holiday resilience planning.
  • Weather impact: It doesn't matter where your business operates—New Jersey, New York, Colorado, California—the role of Mother Nature in Q4 can bring uncertainty and even complete closures to almost any type of business, heavily impacting operations.

Steps SMBs Can Take to Minimize Holiday Downtime Risks

Now that you understand why holidays are a dangerous time to disruption—and while bad actors are busy in the last quarter of the year, there is also risk from hardware failure, software glitches, bad weather, and more—let's talk about how to protect your business.

Key steps any small business should take before the holidays hit:

  • Discuss your concerns about downtime with your MSP and ensure they are proactively monitoring for any signs of potential disruption.
  • Make sure you have a reliable backup and restore plan, and thoroughly test those before the holidays.
  • Review your incident response plan with your team to make sure everyone knows what to do if a disruption hits.
  • Craft and communicate clear escalation protocols when key staff are unavailable.
  • Run a cybersecurity assessment with your IT service provider to check for gaps and vulnerabilities that may be easily fixed.

Your MSP should work collaboratively with you to make sure this critical quarter of sales isn't derailed by preventable downtime. That partner can make sure patching is up to date, your assessment is in good shape, and your business continuity tools and processes have been thoroughly tested. They can also likely provide best practices for policies that help protect your business – incident response plans, emergency response contacts, redundancy of not just IT systems but documentation as well.

 Download our business continuity planning ebook

How Managed Services Support SMB Holiday Resilience

One of the biggest benefits of managed services is the reduction of downtime. With 24/7 IT monitoring of your systems, plus proactive maintenance, managed services help to bake resilience into your organization. At Exigent, we extend that benefit by working closely with clients to ensure each of them has an IT roadmap that includes plans for reducing reliance on legacy technology and addresses each business's unique business continuity and cybersecurity needs. Layered over all of that planning is responsive IT support from our service team, who are only a phone call or email away, even during the hectic holiday season.

The holidays should be worry-free—even for small businesses and their owners.

Contact Exigent to ensure your business continuity holiday season plan is ready before the season.

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