Hours of operation over the holidays

Hours of operation over the holidays

As the end-of-year period approaches, this note sets out blueAPACHE's holiday hours, how support priorities are handled while offices operate on reduced staffing, and how to reach us at any hour if something goes wrong.

The short version

Critical support never stops. 24/7 monitoring and emergency response operate continuously through the entire holiday period, including every public holiday. Routine, business-hours service requests operate on reduced staffing and are not handled on gazetted public holidays.

Understanding the three support tiers

The distinction between tiers is what determines your experience over the break, so it is worth being precise about it.

Tier 1 — 24/7 proactive monitoring and emergency support

Operates continuously, unchanged, throughout the holidays.

This covers monitoring of managed infrastructure and response to critical incidents: an outage, a service degradation affecting multiple users, a suspected security incident, a failure that stops the business operating. These are detected and responded to at any hour on any date.

Most of what this tier does is invisible — automated monitoring identifies conditions before they become incidents, and many are remediated without anyone raising a ticket.

Tier 2 — escalated priority, on call

Available on call throughout the period.

This covers issues with material business impact that fall below the emergency threshold: a single important system degraded, a process blocked for a team, a problem that will become critical if left until offices reopen.

If you are unsure whether something qualifies, log it and describe the business impact plainly — what cannot happen, and by when it needs to. Triage is our job.

Tier 3 — business-day operational support

Reduced over the period; not operating on gazetted public holidays.

This covers routine service requests: new user onboarding, access and permission changes, non-urgent configuration, software installation, general questions. Expect longer turnaround than usual between Christmas and New Year.

How to reach us

Use the service desk, not an individual. Over a holiday period this is not a formality — the engineer you normally deal with may be on leave, while the queue is monitored continuously and routed to whoever is on shift.

Preparing your environment before you close

Nominate holiday-period authorisers

Decide now who can approve a change, authorise emergency work, or confirm an unusual request while your usual approver is unavailable. Give us the names and mobile numbers in advance. The alternative — trying to establish authority at 2am on 28 December — is where recovery time is lost.

Set your change freeze explicitly

Define the start and end dates and, importantly, the exemptions. A blanket freeze that also blocks security patching for an actively exploited vulnerability trades one risk for a larger one. State which categories remain permitted.

Test a restore, not a backup report

A green backup dashboard confirms that a job completed, not that the data is recoverable. Restore something real before the break. Failures discovered in mid-January are far more expensive than failures discovered in mid-December.

Audit what runs unattended

List everything with a date attached that falls inside the shutdown: certificate expiries, licence and subscription renewals, scheduled batch jobs, billing runs, domain renewals. TLS certificates expiring over the Christmas period are a recurring and entirely avoidable cause of outages.

Brief your staff on verification

Social engineering rises sharply over holidays because the normal verification path — walk over and ask — does not exist. One message before the break: no payment, no change of bank details, and no unusual access request is actioned without a voice call to a known number. Not the number in the email.

Reduce your attack surface where you can

If remote access, VPN endpoints or administrative interfaces are not needed by anyone over the break, restricting them for the duration removes exposure at the point where detection is slowest.

Returning to work

The first week back carries a predictable backlog: deferred requests, new-year onboarding, and whatever accumulated while the freeze was on. Two practical steps:

1. Resume patching on a scheduled date, not "when things settle down." Vulnerabilities published during the break are already being exploited by the time offices reopen.
2. Prioritise the backlog honestly. If everything is marked urgent, the genuinely urgent items queue behind routine ones.

Frequently asked questions

What is the short answer on holiday coverage? Critical support never stops. 24/7 monitoring and emergency response operate continuously through the entire period including every public holiday, while routine business-hours service requests run on reduced staffing and are not handled on gazetted public holidays.

What does Tier 1 cover? Monitoring of managed infrastructure and response to critical incidents — an outage, a degradation affecting multiple users, a suspected security incident, or a failure that stops the business operating. These are detected and responded to at any hour on any date. Most of what this tier does is invisible, with conditions identified and remediated before anyone raises a ticket.

What is Tier 2 for? Issues with material business impact that fall below the emergency threshold: a single important system degraded, a process blocked for a team, or a problem that will become critical if left until offices reopen. It is available on call throughout the period.

What if I cannot tell which tier my issue belongs to? Log it and describe the business impact plainly — what cannot happen, and by when. The page is explicit that triage is blueAPACHE's job, not the client's.

What is Tier 3, and what should I expect from it? Business-day operational support covering routine requests: new user onboarding, access and permission changes, non-urgent configuration, software installation and general questions. Turnaround is longer than usual between Christmas and New Year, and it does not operate on gazetted public holidays.

Why log through the service desk rather than an individual engineer? Because over a holiday period the engineer you normally deal with may be on leave, while the queue is monitored continuously and routed to whoever is on shift.

What should we do before closing? Nominate holiday-period authorisers and supply names and mobile numbers in advance; set the change freeze explicitly with its exemptions; test an actual restore rather than reading a backup report; audit everything with a date inside the shutdown, including certificate expiries, licence and subscription renewals, scheduled batch jobs, billing runs and domain renewals; brief staff on out-of-band verification; and restrict remote access, VPN endpoints and administrative interfaces nobody needs over the break.

Why does social engineering rise over the holidays? Because the normal verification path — walking over and asking — does not exist. The control the page recommends is a single message before the break: no payment, no change of bank details and no unusual access request is actioned without a voice call to a known number, and never the number in the email.

What should we do on returning to work? Resume patching on a scheduled date rather than "when things settle down", because vulnerabilities published during the break are already being exploited by the time offices reopen — and prioritise the backlog honestly, since marking everything urgent puts genuinely urgent items behind routine ones.

Related

• Support
• Support and service levels
• Managed services
• Managed detection and response
• Security services
• Human risk management
• Offsite backup as a service
• Disaster recovery as a service
• Connectivity
• Offices and contact
• Service agreement
• Contact

Thank you

Thank you for your partnership this year. From everyone at blueAPACHE — across Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, London and Miami — we wish you a safe and enjoyable break.

blueAPACHE has provided managed services, cloud, security and connectivity to Australian organisations since 1998 and today employs more than 280 staff.

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