It’s Christmas Day. You’re finally off the clock, enjoying time with family and friends when the dreaded call comes.

Customer systems are going down.
Ransomware demands are popping up.
Your phone lights up like a Christmas tree…and you’re hours away from a place where you can actually help.

As precious minutes tick by, you’re frantically coaching your staff through a thrown-together plan to stop the attack before the worst happens. You’re digging through old tickets, half-finished checklists, and stale documentation while your techs keep asking the same questions:

  • Who do we call first—the client, the carrier, the lawyer?
  • Are we supposed to shut systems down or keep them online for forensics?
  • Where’s the latest incident response plan… do we have one?

Criminals know you’re busy around the holidays, and that’s when they launch their biggest attacks. They’re counting on distraction, thin staffing, and the simple fact that most MSPs are still running incident response out of their owner’s head and a few “somewhere-in-SharePoint” PDFs.

So the real question is:

In those most important, early hours of a threat response, will your team have the playbook they need to run… or just your voice on speakerphone?

Because those first 2–4 hours are where you either:

  • Contain the incident, control the narrative, and line things up for clean insurance recovery, or
  • Make one or two panicked moves that hand an insurance carrier or opposing attorney everything they need to deny a claim or build a negligence case.

Where Cyber Liability Essentials fits in

Cyber Liability Essentials (CLE) is designed to make sure you’re not just “pretty secure,” but actually defensible when something goes wrong. It builds the essential elements of cyber liability defense—the evidence, documentation, and processes your clients will need to defend themselves (and your MSP) from ugly lawsuits and insurance claim denials.

In practical terms, here’s what that means for you before the holidays hit:

  • Ready-to-go incident response plan
    You don’t start from a blank page at 2 a.m. CLE gives you both technical and non-technical incident response playbooks—who does what, in what order, and how you communicate with clients, carriers, lawyers, and the press when things are on fire instead of peaceful and bright.
  • Clear roles, not chaos
    Your team knows who is in charge, who talks to the client, who talks to the carrier, who leads technical triage, and who is documenting every action for later. No more “too many cooks in the war room” while the clock (and the billable damage) keeps running.
  • Acceptable Use Policy with proof, not just a PDF
    CLE doesn’t just dump an AUP template on you and call it a day. It tracks approvals, version history, and employee sign-off—creating the kind of evidence carriers and attorneys actually look for when deciding whether your client acted responsibly…or negligently.
  • Evidence of training, not “we meant to”
    When regulators or insurers ask, “Can you show us your user security training and completion records?” CLE lets you answer with a few clicks instead of a nervous shrug. You get user security awareness training, technical training for IT staff, and proof that it actually happened.
  • Documented critical assets, not guesswork under pressure
    Your team knows ahead of time what’s most important, where it lives, and what’s protecting it. That means in the middle of a holiday ransomware incident, you’re not wasting time figuring out which systems are crown jewels and which ones can wait.
  • A secure, offline-accessible repository
    When the worst-case scenario hits and production systems are offline or quarantined, CLE keeps your policies, plans, and training evidence accessible in a separate, hardened repository—so your playbook doesn’t go down with your client’s network.

Put simply: Cyber Liability Essentials turns “we thought we were in decent shape” into “we can prove it, on paper, in court, and to the carrier.”

Why this matters before Christmas, not after

Most MSPs only realize how much documentation they don’t have the first time a carrier asks pointed questions like:

  • “Can you show us the signed AUPs for the affected users?”
  • “Where is the incident response plan you say you followed?”
  • “Do you have records showing users were trained on phishing before this incident?”

If your answer is anything like, “We’re working on pulling that together,” you’re already on the back foot. That’s when claims get delayed, reduced, or denied—and when your MSP starts getting CC’d on angry emails from counsel.

Your next step: Don’t white-knuckle December

You don’t need a 6-month consulting project to fix this. You need a structured starting point and a deadline.

That’s what the Cyber Liability Launchpad in December is for.

Register for the Cyber Liability Launchpad, and you can walk into the holidays with:

  • A documented, MSP-approved incident response plan for your own firm
  • Playbooks your team can actually follow without you on the phone
  • A baseline of AUPs, training, and critical asset documentation rolling out to your client base
  • A clear path to turn this into recurring revenue, not free chaos management

So this year, when those sleighbells ring, you shouldn’t be picturing ransomware notes and panicked after-hours calls.

You should be thinking:
“We’ve got a plan. We’ve got proof. And my team knows exactly what to do.”

Register for the Cyber Liability Launchpad in December and have your incident response plan—and your holiday season—under control.