Before year-end, focus IT effort on six outcomes you can verify: reduce internet-facing exposure, prove backups restore, make cloud costs and ownership visible, set accountable rules for AI, map critical suppliers, and test continuity plans. Each can be scoped as a deliverable with an owner, evidence of completion, and a clear next step for anything unfinished.
1. Reduce internet-facing exposure
Start with a current inventory of services reachable from the internet, including systems hosted by third parties. For each service, record its business owner, purpose, support status, and who is responsible for updates. The Australian Cyber Security Centre recommends rapidly addressing vulnerabilities of all severities in internet-facing services, with greater urgency for unsupported services. That is a useful operational benchmark; its guidance is not automatically a legal requirement for every organization.
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Deliverable: a smaller, better-maintained attack surface
- List public websites, remote-access gateways, APIs, cloud workloads, and other externally reachable services.
- Remove services that have no current business need. For systems that must remain, patch promptly or apply a documented mitigation where a fix is not yet available.
- Prioritize unsupported services for replacement or removal; do not treat lack of vendor support as an ordinary patch backlog.
- Review access using least privilege, separate systems into appropriate network segments, and apply secure configuration baselines.
Close the work with a dated inventory, a record of what was removed or updated, and named owners for remaining exposures. If your team cannot safely operate a public-facing service, consider whether a qualified security or managed-service provider can take responsibility for the work; define patching, escalation, and recovery expectations before handing it over.
2. Prove that recovery works
A backup is useful only if it can be restored when needed. The Australian Cyber Security Centre advises keeping recent backups, protecting them, and testing them. Protection means guarding copies against unauthorized access, modification, and deletion—not merely having another copy somewhere.
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Deliverable: a witnessed restore exercise
- Choose a representative system or data set and a recent backup.
- Restore it in a realistic test environment, then verify that the recovered data and service are usable.
- Record how long recovery took, what failed, and who would make decisions during a real incident.
- Check that backup copies are protected from the credentials and networks used by production systems, and that unauthorized users cannot alter or delete them.
Storage options should be judged by restore time, capacity, separation from production access, resistance to tampering or deletion, and the ability to test restores. An external backup drive can provide a separate physical copy, but hardware alone does not make a backup secure or prove it can be restored.
3. Make cloud cost and governance visible
Cloud work is easier to prioritize when leaders can see what services exist, what they support, who owns them, and what they cost. Include legacy systems and dependencies that still affect cloud operations; otherwise, a migration or cleanup can shift risk rather than reduce it.
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Deliverable: an owned cloud inventory and a short action list
- Record cloud services, business owners, important dependencies, and recurring costs.
- Review each service for business value, security and operational risk, and whether it is still needed.
- Choose a small number of migration, consolidation, or retirement actions that can realistically be completed before year-end.
- For any provider or managed-service option, compare security responsibilities and patching speed, resilience and recovery commitments, cost visibility, migration and exit effort, concentration risk, data handling and auditability, and the staff needed to operate it.
The Australian whole-of-government cloud policy took effect on July 1, 2026. It applies to non-corporate Commonwealth entities; corporate Commonwealth entities are encouraged to adopt it where appropriate. It is a jurisdiction-specific policy, not a general rule for private businesses or organizations elsewhere. On the effective date, Australian Digital Transformation Agency Deputy Chief Executive Officer Lucy Poole said the policy gives agencies “a clearer, more consistent basis for making cloud decisions” affecting the security, resilience, and value for money of government services. Read the DTA announcement.
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4. Put accountable controls around AI use
AI adoption makes governance a practical IT task, not just a policy discussion. The European Commission reported that nearly 20% of EU enterprises deployed AI in 2026, while adoption increased by 48% in 2025 compared with 2024. These are EU enterprise figures, not estimates for all organizations worldwide. See the European Commission figures.
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Deliverable: a reviewed register of AI uses and risks
- List approved AI uses and the teams or business owners accountable for them.
- Set rules for sensitive data, access, human review, and consequential outputs that could materially affect people or operations.
- Identify how an AI-related failure, misuse, or security incident would be detected, escalated, and contained.
- Have leadership review material risks and confirm who can approve, suspend, or change each use.
Sector and jurisdiction matter. APRA expects regulated Australian entities using AI to strengthen governance, risk management, operational resilience, and board oversight. UK authorities advise regulated firms to ensure senior leaders understand frontier AI risks and that vulnerability, protection, and response capabilities keep pace. These expectations should not be presented as universal legal obligations. APRA’s AI guidance and the UK regulators’ joint statement explain their respective contexts.
5. Map critical suppliers and shared dependencies
Important operations may depend on more than a contracted provider. Platforms, external applications, software libraries, and other shared services can create failure paths that are easy to miss if supplier reviews stop at a vendor list.
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Deliverable: a dependency map with an outage route
- Identify providers, platforms, applications, libraries, and services that support important business operations.
- For each critical dependency, record the operational impact of an outage or vulnerability.
- Name the internal owner, escalation contact or route, and recovery alternative or workaround.
- Look for concentration: multiple important systems may rely on the same platform or provider.
APRA has highlighted that common technology platforms can create correlated disruption risk across entities. UK authorities call for effective management of third-party and supply-chain cyber risks, including external applications, libraries, and services. Those statements address regulated audiences in their respective jurisdictions, but the dependency-mapping practice is useful more broadly. APRA’s operational-risk guidance and the UK joint statement provide the sector context.
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6. Test continuity and fund the next steps
Plans do not show whether people can respond under pressure until they are exercised. The Australian Cyber Security Centre recommends exercising incident-response and business-continuity plans. APRA expects regulated entities to test continuity plans regularly against severe but plausible operational disruptions.
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- Designed to work with Windows or Mac computers, this external hard drive makes backup a snap just drag and drop
- To get set up, connect the portable hard drive to a computer for automatic recognition no software required
- This USB drive provides plug and play simplicity with the included 18 inch USB 3.0 cable
- The available storage capacity may vary.
Deliverable: an exercise record and prioritized follow-through
- Run a tabletop scenario or a technical exercise involving the teams needed to respond.
- Test the relevant incident-response, business-continuity, and disaster-recovery arrangements against a plausible disruption.
- Document decisions, gaps, dependencies, and recovery steps that did not work as intended.
- Assign each corrective action an owner and deadline, then rank unresolved work for the next budget period.
Do not let the exercise end as a meeting note: connect each material gap to a funded action or an explicit decision to accept the risk, with an accountable owner.
Turn the six wins into a year-end plan
Use a short status review to keep the work achievable. For each win, name one accountable owner, define evidence that will demonstrate completion, and set a date for review. If the calendar is tight, prioritize actions that reduce immediate exposure or prove recovery, then schedule the remaining cleanup and governance work with owners and deadlines. Rules differ by industry and country; regulated organizations should check their applicable local requirements before treating these workstreams as compliance claims.
Quick Recap
| Win | Evidence to retain |
|---|---|
| Internet-facing exposure | Current service inventory; removals, patches, or mitigations; owners for remaining items |
| Backup recovery | Restore exercise record, verification result, recovery time, and backup access protections |
| Cloud governance | Service and dependency inventory, owners, costs, and chosen cleanup or migration actions |
| AI controls | Approved-use register, accountable owners, data rules, and leadership review |
| Supplier dependencies | Critical dependency map, impact notes, escalation route, and recovery path |
| Continuity | Exercise findings, corrective-action owners, deadlines, and next-period priorities |
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