Heavy Holiday Traffic & Lessons for Small Firms
Heavy Holiday Traffic & Lessons for Small Firms
Every December, Americans brace for the same headache: holiday traffic. Airports overflow with passengers. Highways are clogged with ONE STALLED VEHICHLE backing up for miles.
Your firm’s technology is no different — especially during the Christmas rush, even if you are not in retail.
According to the FBI’s IC3 Report, U.S. businesses lost over $12.5 billion to cybercrime in 2023¹ — with attacks surging during peak holiday periods when defenses are stretched thin.
Increased digital congestion creates real risk. Smaller CPA, tax, financial, and legal firms with highly confidential & regulated data become a target and the increased traffic everywhere makes maintaining client privacy a significant problem.
Here’s what your firm can learn from holiday travel season chaos.
Heavy Traffic and weak spots in your IT Roads
During the holidays, email volume spikes, clients request end of year documents, and internal staff is inconsistent with holidays and time off. That creates congestion and weaker internal surveillance. Cybercriminals use this to their advantage.
Like pick-pockets targeting stressed travelers, cyber attackers descend into the chaos:
Fake “package delivery” phishing
Spoofed client emails
Malicious links disguised as cloud document requests
Industry Leaders Magazine reports that 90% of cyber incidents involve human error² — and just like rushed drivers, rushed employees make mistakes.
Holiday IT Lesson: Add more “traffic signals.” Special Holiday training, Multi-factor authentication, and email threat filtering, to reduce collisions.
Outdated Systems Are Like Aging Highways —
One Breakdown Creates a Pile-Up
During peak-season traffic, old roads crack under pressure. Similarly, legacy servers, unpatched apps, outdated laptops, and even cloud based apps struggle when workloads surge.
For compliance-driven firms, a single system slowdown can:
Delay filings
Interrupt client communications
Expose sensitive data
Trigger regulatory scrutiny
Digital Road Crew required.
A digital road crew (MSP) like Nerdwork Services, LLC not only fills the potholes in a system breakdown, the build in structure to prevent the problems ahead of time.
By strengthening back office IT services, providing vendor/cloud app scrutiny, and cybersecurity protections issues are identified and prevented before they snowball into a 15 car pileup.
Holiday IT Lesson: Modernize your “infrastructure” before the traffic and weather hits, not after a breakdown.
Smart Travelers Plan Detours —
Smart Firms Need Backup Routes
Holiday travelers know delays are inevitable, so they prepare plan B and maybe C.
Small firms though are lucky to have plan A. Growing their IT structure on an as needed basis, the cobbled together solutions just break down with traffic.
They need a real road map that provides viable detours. In your IT back office this looks like:
Documented incident response plans
Validated data backups
Failover systems for compliance workflows
Without these, one cyber incident can shut down operations the same way one fender-bender can shut down a freeway.
Holiday IT Lesson: Backup routes keep you moving — even when the main road fails.
Keep your firm moving through the holiday crush
Even if your firm slows through this holiday season, do not be lulled into a sense of security.
Peak-season congestion will expose the weaknesses already in your IT environment. It is important to find these before the weaknesses become an unrecoverable breach.
It is not too late to protect your clients’ sensitive data — find your weaknesses.
Download the Cybersecurity Compliance Checklist for CPAs and contact Nerdwork Services, LLC to clear your digital roadways before the next holiday rush.
Sources
FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), 2023 Annual Report
Industry Leaders Magazine, Cybersecurity Breach: How Human Errors Lead to Most Risks?
To help you stay compliant, we have created the IT Compliance Checklist for CPAs. This is the comprehensive checklist you need to identify issues, fix them, and build compliance BEFORE your next audit.
If you have any questions or need further explanation, this checklist comes with a 30 minute consult to personalize this checklist to your firm.
STAYING COMPLIANT -IT Compliance Checklist for CPAs
Nerdworks Services, LLC specializes in helping accounting firms and other compliance-driven companies navigate remote work's complexities while maintaining compliance and supervision standards through collaborative consulting, infrastructure design, IT management, training, and ongoing support.
Nerdworks Services, LLC | 1901 Central Drive, Suite 401, Bedford, Texas 76021 | 682-324-9360 | website:https://nerdworks.services/ email:[email protected]
