December is a complicated month for business owners. You are managing the end of the fiscal year, the holiday crunch, and — if you are like most of our clients — a backlog of IT and security maintenance that got deferred through the rest of the year. The impulse is to push it to January. Do not.
The period between Christmas and New Year's, when offices are quieter and staff traffic is reduced, is one of the best windows of the year for maintenance, audits, and remediation work that is harder to do when the building is full. Attackers know this too — holiday breaks are among the most active periods for ransomware deployment and network intrusion, precisely because response capabilities are reduced.
Here is the checklist we work through with our managed clients every December. You do not need to tackle all of it yourself — but you do need to know whether it is being done.
1. Test your burglar alarm system end-to-end. This means walking every sensor zone, verifying that activations register at the panel and at your monitoring center, confirming your monitoring center's call list is current with correct contacts and phone numbers, and testing the backup communication path if your primary path fails. Alarm systems that have not been tested in over a year frequently have silent failures that are invisible until an actual event.
2. Inspect and test your fire alarm system. Illinois law requires annual testing of commercial fire alarm systems by a licensed contractor. If you have not had your annual inspection this year, December is a reasonable time to schedule it — before your certificate of occupancy is at risk during a January inspection. Verify that your monitoring center is receiving fire signals, that all notification appliances (horns, strobes) are functioning, and that your smoke and heat detectors are clean and unobstructed.
3. Review your security camera coverage and storage. Check that all camera feeds are active and recording, that storage retention meets your requirements (most businesses should retain at least 30 days), and that camera lenses have not been obscured, redirected, or physically damaged during the year. Review camera angles in areas that have seen changes — new shelving, moved equipment, or renovated spaces often create new blind spots.
4. Audit and clean up access credentials. Pull a report of every active user in your access control system. Employees who left during the year, contractors whose projects are complete, and temporary staff who were never deactivated represent live security vulnerabilities. Year-end is the natural inflection point for this cleanup — review every credential, deactivate anything that should not be active, and document the changes.
5. Verify your backup posture and test restores. Backups that have never been tested are not really backups. December is the time to actually restore a test dataset from your backup system and confirm that the restore process works as expected. Verify that backup jobs are completing successfully, that retention policies match your business requirements, and that at least one copy of your data exists offline or in immutable cloud storage beyond the reach of ransomware.
6. Patch and update all systems. Run a comprehensive patch cycle across workstations, servers, network devices, and business applications. Many organizations fall behind on patching through the year; year-end is the natural moment to close the gap. Pay particular attention to operating systems, remote access software, and any application that touches the internet or processes payments. If you are running any end-of-life software, December is the time to plan migration — running unsupported software through another calendar year is a decision with real consequences.
7. Audit user accounts across all systems. Beyond physical access credentials, review user accounts in your business applications, cloud services, email platform, and any SaaS tools your team uses. Departed employees whose accounts were not fully offboarded — particularly in email and cloud storage — represent both a security risk and a data governance problem. A thorough year-end offboarding audit often turns up multiple accounts that were missed during the year.
8. Review your network architecture and connected devices. Over the course of a year, networks accumulate unauthorized devices, shadow IT services, and forgotten infrastructure. Run a network scan to see what is actually connected. Identify any devices or services that were added without formal approval. Verify that your network segmentation — separating guest Wi-Fi from business systems, for example — is intact and functioning as designed.
Year-end reality check: The most common finding in IT security audits is not sophisticated technical vulnerabilities — it is basic hygiene failures that accumulated gradually. Old accounts, unpatched systems, lapsed backups, and forgotten access credentials. A structured year-end review catches these before they become incidents.
9. Review your cyber insurance policy. Cyber insurance requirements have tightened significantly in recent years. Many policies now require specific controls — MFA on all remote access, endpoint detection and response software, immutable backups — as conditions of coverage. Review your current policy against your actual security posture. If you have a control gap that your policy requires, that gap means you may not be covered in an event. Annual renewal conversations are the time to close these gaps and negotiate appropriate coverage.
10. Assess your PCI compliance status if you process card payments. PCI DSS 4.0 is fully enforced. If you have not formally assessed your compliance status since the transition, December is the time to understand where you stand before the new year brings new audit cycles. This applies to any business that takes credit or debit card payments, regardless of transaction volume.
11. Complete or schedule annual security awareness training. Security awareness training is most effective when it is consistent and current. If your staff has not had formal training this year — on phishing identification, password practices, social engineering tactics, and incident reporting — December is the right time to either complete a session or formally schedule it for January. Annual training records matter for cyber insurance, PCI compliance, and general defensibility if an incident occurs.
12. Document and test your incident response plan. What happens in the first hour if ransomware deploys, if a fire alarm activates, or if a break-in occurs during the holiday closure? An incident response plan that exists in someone's head and has never been written down is not a plan — it is a hope. December is the right time to either create a basic documented plan or walk through your existing plan and verify that contact information, escalation paths, and response procedures are current and known to the right people.
For our managed IT and managed security clients, year-end review is part of the service. We run structured assessments in December — patch verification, backup testing, access credential audits, camera system checks, fire alarm coordination — and deliver a written summary of findings and recommendations for the coming year.
If you are not a current managed client and want to enter 2027 with a clear picture of your security and IT posture, a one-time year-end assessment is a practical starting point. We will evaluate your physical security systems, IT infrastructure, and cybersecurity controls against a defined baseline and give you a prioritized action list — not a sales pitch, a roadmap.
Schedule your year-end IT and security review before the holidays. We will assess your systems, close known gaps, and give you a prioritized plan for the new year.
Schedule Your Year-End Review