February 2016 News

Community IT February 2016 News: The Year of Security
As an IT provider, we think about security all the time, and about balancing the need for protection, while being realistic about the risks in light of budget constraints.
We always try to bring value to that equation, and are constantly expanding our knowledge base of tools that can proactively predict and defend against security threats.
Our January free webinar sharing research from OpenDNS about threats to nonprofits was very well attended, reconfirming the need to share research and best practices on this critical topic. If you weren’t able to attend you can check out our slides and the recording of the webinar on our website.
We also learned recently that the paper we sponsored with Idealware, What Nonprofits Need to Know About Security: a Practical Guide to Managing Risk, is our most downloaded material to date, and one of their most popular offerings.
The whitepaper provides guidance for assessing risk, explains basic protection, and discusses building a culture that values security. Idealware also provides a helpful checklist for developing policies to guide staff, and a security one pager that can be distributed to staff for training. The paper also presents case studies of how two nonprofits chose to deal with their particular security issues. It can be downloaded for free from the Idealware website.
Even if downtime or an outage isn’t caused by a malicious attack, but perhaps by flooded pipes during a snowstorm, your organization will always need to get back up and running quickly with a full recovery.
You can join us in February as our next webinar will explore this aspect of security – Backups and Disaster Recovery for Nonprofits February 18th from 4-5pm EST. We will walk through the approaches available to nonprofits, discussing pros and cons, particularly as they relate to the size and function of the organization. Backups can be on-premise or remote, full or incremental, and need to include remote devices and take security and access into account.
Please let me know if you have questions or ideas for future webinar topics, and follow me @CommunityIT or FaceBook for all my latest posts and news.
Warm Regards,
Johan Hammerstrom, President & CEO