The worst nightmare for a nonprofit or business may well be arson.
Last week, it happened to End Hunger Connecticut! Their Hartford office was severely damaged by fire, and they’ve temporarily moved into their old space until their office is restored.
I caught up with Lucy Nolan, End Hunger Connecticut’s imperturbable Executive Director (“We have no reason to doubt our safety and are happy to be moving forward,” declared Nolan in a press release about the situation).
Lucy and Deputy Director Dawn Crayco were soldiering on with running their community programs and advocacy work, helping to ensure that the hungriest of our state’s residents can find their next meal.
“But…[I was afraid to ask]…What happened to all of your data? Was it destroyed in the fire?”
Lucy perked up. “No, our data is fine. It was in the cloud!”
She went to say that End Hunger Connecticut! had invested in a system awhile back to store their data in “the cloud”–a distant commercial data center where it is encrypted and secure. The day after the fire they were back to work, data intact.
According to Matthew Eschleman of Community IT Innovators in a recent NTEN webinar on Nonprofits & Cloud Computing: A Guide to Navigating the Nonprofit Cloud, that’s one of the biggest advantages to cloud computing: One can access the files from any location with an internet connection, and the files are “scalable”–they can be accessible to 5 people or 5000+ people without any significant new configuration.
More “pros” to cloud computing, according to Matthew:
- Flexibility in accessing data
- Improved back-up systems (the backed up files are off-site)
- Access to the most recent technology
- No hardware or ongoing maintenance to worry about
- Easy sharing and collaboration
- Unlimited storage
- The files are always “on” and available
- Pay for only what you use (easier to budget)
What are the greatest security risk to nonprofits? The answer: “Internal security sloppiness like people leaving their passwords in easy to find places or even giving them to others. Hackers often get their first entry in to an office by getting employees to give them usernames and passwords.”
