> Sure you can try and reduce those as well during the holiday season, but what if a certificate has to be renewed? What if a critical security patch needs to be applied? What if a set of servers need to be reprovisioned? What if a hard disk is running out of space?

Reading this, I see two routine operational issues, one security issue and one hardware issue.

You can’t plan you way around security issues or hardware failures, but operational issues you both can and should plan around. Holiday schedules like this are fixed points in time, so there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t plan all routine works to be completed either a week in advance, or a week after, the holiday period.

Certificates don’t need to be near the point of expiry to be renewed. Capacity doesn’t need to be at critical levels to be expanded. Ultimately, this is a risk management question (as a sibling has also commented). Is the organisation willing to take on increased risk in exchange for deferring operational expenses?

If the operational expense is inevitable (the certificate will need renewing), that seems like an easy answer when it comes to risk management over holidays.

If the operational expense is not inevitable (will we really need to expand capacity?), it then becomes a game of probabilities and financials - likelihood of expense being incurred, amount of expense incurred if done ahead of time, impact to business if something goes wrong during a holiday.