Summer is the one time of year when professional services firms run at a reduced pace, and their security posture quietly relaxes along with it.
That’s not a coincidence, but a pattern. Fewer people in the office means fewer eyes on unusual activity. Staff traveling on personal devices means firm data moving through networks you don’t control. Out-of-office auto-replies mean bad actors know exactly who isn’t watching their inbox. The pressure against your small business network security never takes a break, even when your team does.
The good news is that a few hours of preparation before the summer travel season starts can close the most common gaps. This checklist is built for accounting practices, law offices, and property management firms with distributed summer schedules.
Before Anyone Leaves
Review and update your access controls
This is the step most firms skip because it feels administrative. Do it anyway.
Pull a list of who has access to what. Look specifically for former employees or contractors whose credentials were never deactivated, staff who changed roles but kept legacy access they no longer need, and shared passwords that have never been rotated. Summer is a natural forcing function for this review because you’re already thinking about who will be out and who needs coverage.
Shared credentials for practice management software, document storage, and billing systems are a particular risk during vacation season. When one person is covering for three others, the temptation to use a shared login grows. That’s exactly when you want individual access properly configured, not less.
Confirm MFA is active on every external-facing system
If your staff can access email, client files, or any line-of-business software from outside the office, multi-factor authentication must be enabled. Every account, not just the partners or admins.
Vacation travel is when credentials are most likely to be compromised. Hotel networks, airport Wi-Fi, and coffee shops are not secure environments. MFA doesn’t make a compromised password harmless, but it makes it substantially harder to exploit. Check your configuration now rather than after someone calls from a beach in Mexico, wondering why they can’t log in.
Brief your team before they go
Security policy development works on paper. It works when people understand what to do in a specific situation.
Before staff travel, cover two things. First, remind them not to connect firm devices to public Wi-Fi without a VPN, and make sure the VPN is installed and tested before they leave the office. Second, tell them what to do if something feels wrong: who to call, how to reach remote IT support, and that it’s always better to report something that turns out to be nothing than to stay quiet about something real.
A three-minute conversation before someone leaves for two weeks is worth considerably more than an incident response call from a hotel lobby.
While Your Team Is Out
Set a clear policy on out-of-office responses
Auto-replies are useful, but they’re also a free announcement to anyone probing your firm. A message that says “I’m out until July 14, for urgent matters, contact Jane at [email protected]” hands an attacker a name, an alternate target, and a window of time when the original contact won’t notice something unusual in their account.
Keep out-of-office messages simple. Confirm the person is unavailable and provide a general contact for urgent matters. Avoid specific return dates, alternate contact names and direct emails, or any details about the firm’s operational structure.
Assign coverage for security alerts
Your monitoring tools and security software generate alerts whether or not the right person is watching. Before the summer schedule kicks in, identify who is reviewing alerts for each person who will be out for more than a few days. Remote IT support can handle ongoing monitoring, but your internal point of contact needs to be clearly defined and reachable.
This is particularly important for firms managing client data under confidentiality or compliance requirements. An unmonitored alert from a data access anomaly that sits for two weeks while the responsible partner is in Hawaii is not an acceptable gap.
When People Return
Do a brief device check before reconnecting
Any device that left the office, spent time on home or travel networks, and is now returning to your environment is worth a quick review. This doesn’t have to be complex. Confirm the device has the latest security updates, run a scan with your endpoint protection software, and verify that the VPN connection is functioning properly.
This is especially true for staff who traveled internationally, used airport charging kiosks, or connected to hotel networks. The risk is low for any individual trip. It compounds quickly across a 50-person firm returning from summer vacations.
Revisit your access list one more time
The same review you did before the summer is worth repeating after the summer. Summer often brings personnel changes: interns who have finished, contractors who have completed a project, and staff who have given notice and left during the summer. Each of those is a credential that should be deactivated promptly.
None of these items requires a large time investment. The full list takes an afternoon to work through before summer begins and an hour to verify when it ends. What they do require is actually doing them before something happens, rather than after.
If you want help running through this checklist for your firm, C2 Technology Partners works with professional services firms across Southern California on exactly this kind of proactive security review. Reach out before your team’s out-of-office messages go up.
