Business Security During the Holiday Season: The Risk Isn't Outside, but Inside

Last year, sometime around week 30, our security guard reported damaged fencing at the rear of an industrial park in the Drechtsteden region. He had noticed it during a nighttime patrol and documented it thoroughly with photos. The report sat unaddressed for three days. The client’s regular contact person was on vacation. His replacement didn’t know that the property had a second entrance along the waterfront, and no one felt responsible enough to just give them a quick call. In the end, nothing serious happened—the fence was repaired, and everyone went on vacation. But that incident illustrates exactly what goes wrong at businesses during the summer. It has nothing to do with forgotten lights or open windows.

For corporate security, the vacation season is a fundamentally different time than the rest of the year. This has little to do with what happens outside the gates: within the organization, so much changes during those weeks that the entire risk profile shifts. We share this insight with our clients every spring, because it differs significantly from the standard checklists that pop up every summer.

The number of people with malicious intent in July is roughly the same as in March, so that’s not where the difference lies. The difference lies in how easily they can carry out their activities once school vacations begin and businesses shift into a different mode.

The staff is cut in half—sometimes even more than that. The people who remain are often not the ones who know the location best. The employee who has been working in the same department for fifteen years and immediately notices that something is off about that van in the back lot is on a lake in France. His replacement is doing his best, but doesn’t recognize the regular supplier from the unfamiliar visitor and certainly doesn’t dare to confront anyone about it.

Decision-making slows down noticeably during those same weeks. A report that would normally be addressed within an hour is now waiting for someone who won’t be back for a week and a half. Escalation chains that look sound on paper turn out, in practice, to consist of three people who are all absent at the same time. Every year, we see that follow-up on our reports in July and August proceeds more slowly than during the rest of the year. This no longer surprises us, because that’s simply how an organization operates at half capacity. It is, however, something you can prepare for in advance.

What almost everyone underestimates: the social oversight that normally comes free of charge is no longer there. A full office building or a busy production facility is, to some extent, secure on its own, simply because there are eyes everywhere. People who look outside and see a car in the parking lot that doesn’t belong there, or who quickly close the side door because of a draft. In the summer, that layer disappears. What remains is the security you’ve consciously organized. We’ve also seen cases where a client didn’t realize until August just how much was normally handled behind the scenes by their own employees.

This is where it gets interesting, because for many companies, summer is actually the busiest time of year when it comes to external parties on site. The production line is shut down, so that’s when maintenance has to be done. The office is half-empty, so that’s when painting and renovations take place. Contractors, installers, cleaning companies, and inspection agencies come and go, often with their own keys or temporary access passes, and often with rotating crews.

The result is a paradox we encounter constantly in practice: just when our own staff—who would normally notice such anomalies—are on vacation, an unfamiliar face on the premises becomes the most ordinary sight of the day. In August, no one says a word to someone walking through an open gate in work clothes with a ladder under their arm. We’ve experienced situations where our security guard, during a patrol, turned out to be the only one who asked who someone was and what they were doing there. In that case, the answer was legitimate—the contractor was simply scheduled to be there. But no one on site knew that, and no one would have checked if we hadn’t been there.

Access control is therefore no mere administrative formality during the vacation period. Who has temporary access, to which parts of the building does that access apply, and is it actually revoked once the work is completed? Even in September, we still regularly come across passes and keys that were issued in June to parties that have long since finished their work.

There’s another reason why standard advice about the vacation period is of so little value: summer means something completely different for one company than for another. At a manufacturing company in Brabant, the factory shuts down for three weeks, and the biggest risk is an abandoned site where no one is around for weeks to notice any irregularities. At a distribution center in the Port of Rotterdam, however, operations run at full speed during those same weeks, because the flow of goods doesn’t take a vacation and, for many logistics customers, summer is actually a peak period.

That second scenario entails a very different risk profile. The permanent staff is supplemented by seasonal workers and temporary agency staff who are not yet familiar with the procedures, while the volume of traffic at the gate is higher than ever. At the pace of a peak period, there is simply little time to pause and scrutinize every unfamiliar face. Port security in the summer is therefore much less about locked doors and much more about access control—knowing who is inside—and having a security guard who isn’t afraid to ask follow-up questions when a story doesn’t add up.

We serve both worlds: from shut-down production sites in Brabant and Zeeland to logistics hubs around Rotterdam and the Drechtsteden. A good vacation plan therefore starts with the question of which of these two scenarios applies to your company during the summer. The answer determines whether the focus should be on surveillance and alarm response, or on staffed monitoring of who enters and exits the premises.