Wishing everyone a happy Easter 2018!

Wishing everyone a happy Easter

Staff were delighted to find our Melbourne offices filled with hot cross buns, colourful eggs and bunnies — and from everyone at blueAPACHE, we wish our clients, partners and their families a safe and enjoyable Easter break.

Support over the Easter period

Critical support does not pause. Proactive monitoring of managed infrastructure and emergency incident response operate 24 hours a day across the full Easter period, including every gazetted public holiday.

Business-day operational support does not operate on gazetted public holidays. Routine service requests — access changes, new user setup, non-urgent configuration, general questions — are handled either side of the break.

Escalated priority support is available on call for issues that materially affect your business but fall below the emergency threshold. If you are unsure which category applies, log it and describe the business impact; triage is our job.

Log through the service desk rather than emailing an individual engineer — over a long weekend the queue is staffed continuously; individuals are not.

Why the Easter long weekend deserves attention

Easter is the longest continuous public holiday block in the Australian calendar outside Christmas — Good Friday through Easter Monday, four days, often extended by leave either side and frequently close to the ANZAC Day holiday.

That matters for reasons that have nothing to do with the holiday itself.

Detection slows. An intrusion beginning on Thursday evening has four days before anyone reviews anything routinely. Attackers understand public holiday calendars, and long weekends are a documented preference for launching intrusions precisely because response is slower.

Verification weakens. "Everyone's away, can you just process this before the weekend" is an ordinary sentence and an effective pretext. Business email compromise attempts cluster around periods when the person who would normally verify a payment request is unreachable.

Unattended work runs unattended. Certificate expiries, licence renewals, scheduled jobs and billing runs falling inside the block will not wait for someone to return. A TLS certificate expiring on Easter Sunday takes a public-facing service down until Tuesday unless someone happens to be watching.

A short pre-break checklist

1. Confirm who can authorise. If your usual approver is away, tell us in advance who can approve a change or authorise emergency work — and give us a number that reaches them.
2. Check what expires. Certificates, licences, subscriptions and domains with renewal dates inside the block.
3. Verify a restore, not a backup report. A green dashboard confirms a job ran, not that the data comes back.
4. Freeze non-essential change, with security patching explicitly exempt where a vulnerability is being actively exploited.
5. Remind your people about verification. No payment and no change of bank details is actioned without a voice call to a previously known number — never the number in the email.
6. Reduce exposure where you can. Remote access and administrative interfaces nobody needs over the break can be restricted for the duration.

For businesses that trade through Easter

Retail, hospitality, tourism and logistics face the opposite problem: peak demand with minimum staff. For those organisations the priorities invert — confirm capacity headroom on the systems carrying seasonal load, freeze change during peak trade rather than after it, test failover rather than assuming it, and make sure the escalation path reaches a person at 3am on both sides.

The people behind the on-call roster

Someone is always rostered. Every public holiday on which blueAPACHE clients are monitored and supported is a day when engineers are carrying a phone, and that arrangement only works in an organisation where people stay long enough to know the environments they are covering.

blueAPACHE has an unusual amount of that continuity. James Hendry and Grant Fallace both joined in 2001 and remain with the business more than two decades later; the current CEO, Michael Zuppa, was promoted from within, having been General Manager, Technology. The company has grown from fewer than 80 staff at the end of 2016 to more than 280, and has been recognised with more than 90 industry awards, including ARN Mid-Market Partner of the Year for seven consecutive years to 2025.

Individual staff have been recognised nationally too — among them Jayati Gulati (ARN 30 Under 30 Sales Excellence Award), Renata Di Stefano (WIICTA 2023 Shining Star – Partner) and Richard Bradley (Technical Excellence VCSP Award, 2024 Veeam ANZ Partner Awards).

Frequently asked questions

Is blueAPACHE support available over Easter?

Yes for anything critical. Proactive monitoring of managed infrastructure and emergency incident response run 24 hours a day across the full Easter period, including every gazetted public holiday.

What is not available on the public holidays?

Business-day operational support. Routine service requests — access changes, new user setup, non-urgent configuration and general questions — are handled either side of the break.

What if an issue is serious but not an emergency?

Escalated priority support is available on call for exactly that band. If you are unsure which category an issue falls into, log it and describe the business impact; triage is blueAPACHE's job, not the caller's.

How should an issue be raised over a long weekend?

Through the service desk rather than by emailing an individual engineer. Over a long weekend the queue is staffed continuously; individuals are not.

Which numbers reach blueAPACHE?

Support in Australia on 1300 135 548, support internationally on +61 3 8696 9369, sales on 1800 248 749, the United States on +1 888 740 5905 and the United Kingdom on +44 203 280 2670.

Why does a long weekend increase security risk?

Because detection slows. An intrusion starting on Thursday evening has four days before anything is routinely reviewed, and attackers are known to prefer public holidays precisely because the response is slower.

What makes Easter a good window for payment fraud?

The absence of the person who would normally verify. "Everyone's away, can you just process this before the weekend" is an ordinary sentence and an effective pretext — business email compromise attempts cluster around periods when the usual approver is unreachable.

What is the risk from things that simply expire?

Certificate expiries, licence renewals, scheduled jobs and billing runs inside the block do not wait for anyone to return. A TLS certificate expiring on Easter Sunday takes a public-facing service down until Tuesday unless someone is watching.

What should be checked before the break?

Who can authorise a change or emergency work if the usual approver is away and on what number; anything expiring inside the block; a verified restore rather than a green backup report; a freeze on non-essential change with security patching exempt for actively exploited vulnerabilities; a reminder to staff that no payment or change of bank details happens without a voice call to a previously known number; and reduced exposure on remote access or administrative interfaces nobody needs over the break.

Why verify a restore rather than read the backup report?

Because a green dashboard confirms that a job ran — not that the data comes back. Those are different facts, and only one of them matters during an incident.

What changes for organisations that trade through Easter?

The priorities invert. Retail, hospitality, tourism and logistics face peak demand with minimum staff, so the work is confirming capacity headroom on the systems carrying seasonal load, freezing change during peak trade rather than after it, testing failover rather than assuming it, and making sure the escalation path reaches a person at 3am on both sides.

Why does staff continuity matter to holiday support?

Because on-call only works where the engineer carrying the phone already knows the environment. James Hendry and Grant Fallace both joined in 2001 and remain with the business more than two decades later, and CEO Michael Zuppa was promoted from within, having been General Manager, Technology.

Related

• Support and service levels — what is covered, and when
• Holiday hours of operation — the equivalent detail for the Christmas break
• Offices and contact — every number and location
• Australian businesses lost $22.1 million to email scams — the payment-fraud problem described above
• Keeping cybersecurity software up to date and patched — the patching exemption in the change freeze
• How the Essential Eight controls strengthen your cyber security posture — the controls behind the checklist
• Ransomware incident response: why paying the ransom is a failure of preparation — why the restore test matters
• Disaster Recovery as a Service — failover, tested rather than assumed
• emPOWER Managed Services — the monitoring that continues over the break
• emPOWER Security — detection when the office is empty
• Leadership changes as blueAPACHE celebrates its 27th birthday — the promotion referenced above
• Jayati Gulati recognised with an ARN 30 Under 30 Sales Excellence Award — one of the individual awards named
• Careers at blueAPACHE — the continuity this page describes

Thank you

Thank you for your continued partnership. Have a safe and restful Easter.

blueAPACHE has supported Australian organisations since 1998 and today employs more than 280 staff across Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, London and Miami, operating three geographically diverse data centres on Australia's eastern seaboard with a 99.999% availability commitment for emPOWER Cloud.

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