Six Risk-Based Questions Every Nonprofit Leader Must Ask About IT Preparedness Before Their IT Expert Leaves
Nonprofit organizations rely heavily on their in-house IT experts to keep operations running smoothly. But have you ever thought about what happens if that expert suddenly quits? It’s not just an inconvenience—it could be a disaster. Here are six critical questions to help you identify your IT preparedness, identify potential risks and protect your nonprofit.
When your nonprofit’s in-house IT expert suddenly leaves, the organization might face serious challenges—from downtime to security risks. To avoid disruption, leaders must take a proactive approach to understanding and documenting their IT environment. These six questions can help nonprofits of any size safeguard their operations.
Safeguarding Your Digital Fortress: A Guide to Conducting a Data Security Audit
In today’s digital age, where information is a valuable asset, ensuring the security of your data is paramount. Whether you’re a small business owner or an individual, conducting a data security audit is a proactive measure to safeguard sensitive information. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the importance of data security audits, the step-by-step process, and provide real-world examples to illustrate key concepts.
Why Conduct a Data Security Audit?
Protecting Sensitive Information:
In an era of frequent cyber threats, protecting sensitive data has become a top priority. A data security audit helps identify vulnerabilities and ensures that personal and confidential information remains out of the wrong hands.
System patching is critical to the security of the software and hardware that make up computer systems. When vendors become aware of vulnerabilities in their products, like the recent discovery of multiple flaws in Apache’s Log4j logging library, they often issue patches to fix those vulnerabilities. Making sure that relevant patches are applied to the computer systems that are critical to your organization as soon as possible can keep your systems protected.
What are patches?
Patches are software and operating system (OS) updates that address security vulnerabilities within a program or product. Software vendors may choose to release updates to fix performance bugs, as well as to provide enhanced security features.
How do you find out what software updates you need to install?
When software updates become available, vendors usually put them on their websites for users to download. Some vendors like Microsoft, Apple, Google and Adobe, provide these updates or patches through an automated system. Install updates as soon as possible to protect your computer, phone, or other digital device against attackers who would take advantage of system vulnerabilities. Attackers may target vulnerabilities for months or even years after updates are available.
Now, more than ever, we’re seeing a rapid change in the way the world does business, and where the world does business from, making technology more essential than ever. And when it comes to getting work done, 71% of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) use desktops as their primary computer, which can make working at home or remote working, a huge challenge for many and has greatly increased the demand for mobile, work-from-home devices.
If there’s one thing that current events have shown, it is that nothing will be the same again. In particular, the way we work. The new workforce, now spanning the different work styles of five generations, has already changed the way our businesses are organized.
Our workplaces have to be far more flexible.
Remote workplaces need to support the shiny, new technologies we’re increasingly used to as consumers, while delivering the superior performance and reliability that business demands. Work is no longer a designated space in the office but an activity that we do, when and where we choose, whether that’s a coffee shop or in a home office.
Protect your business from being a target for cyber crime before it’s too late.
Small business owners used to have to watch for thieves who worked at night and carried a crowbar. Today, they are under attack by criminals on computers that are thousands of miles away.
Many attacks on small businesses are done with malware. First, the malicious software lands on a computer at the business. Then it quietly gathers data, such as credit card information, and sends it secretly to thieves over the internet.
Once a thief has the data, he can quickly turn it into cash. He can sell it on the black market, or he can make purchases and phony credit cards. The end result is the same: the business’ bank accounts are emptied, and the thief never even sees the building.
Your Business Or Organization Is A Target
The news headlines are filled with cyber attacks on big retailers. But small businesses are far more likely to be hacked. Why? Because most have almost no network security. They are an easy payday or what Kevin Fream calls “easy prey” for cyber thieves.
There’s no way to predict the future, and Murphy’s Law tells us that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. If you and your business or organization do not have a well-thought out disaster recovery plan, your company’s data is teetering on the edge of a cliff without a safety net.
Having a comprehensive and well thought-out data backup and disaster recovery plan in place when there is data loss can help your organization or business survive malicious cyber attacks like ransomware.
In the last few years, we’ve seen plenty of organizations in the news for suffering huge damage from cyber attacks. And there does not seem to be any pointers that cyber incidents are going to reduce any time soon.
However, while cyber attacks as a cause of downtime have almost doubled as the cause of data loss, the rate at which it continues to cause downtime havoc will depend on improvements made to defensive and responsive measures like having a backup and disaster recovery plan.
What are backup and disaster recovery?
There’s an important distinction between backup and disaster recovery.
Backup is the process of making an extra copy (or multiple copies) of data. You back up data to protect it. You might need to restore backup data if you encounter an accidental deletion, database corruption, or problem with a software upgrade.
Disaster recovery, on the other hand, refers to the plan and processes for quickly reestablishing access to applications, data, and IT resources after an outage. That plan might involve switching over to a redundant set of servers and storage systems until your primary data center is functional again.
