Nonprofit Resources
National Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Keep IT Going
October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and the Department of Homeland Security is focusing on the theme of “Own IT. Secure IT. Protect IT.”
During the month, we’ve provided resources to help you increase your organization’s cybersecurity knowledge and decrease your risk. Now let’s look at how you can take your cybersecurity efforts to the next level.
Arm Your Team
Your organization’s employees and leaders play an important role in cybersecurity.
- Provide ongoing cybersecurity training to keep all your network users informed of current cyber threats and how they can help protect your organization. Everyone should attend, including executives and board members.
- Today’s leaders have a new role: cyber guardian. Here are two important steps leaders can take to be successful in this role.
Assess Your Risk
You have to know what risks exist within your organization before you can start mitigating them.
- The goal of an IT audit is to make your organization more secure. Check out this overview to understand what internal and external IT audits involve and how they can benefit organizations of all sizes. Then follow these four steps to develop an efficient and effective IT audit program.
- Take our free online Cyber Fitness Self-Test to see how “cyber fit” your organization really is. You’ll get an immediate score with feedback and recommendations.
- See how our team of cybersecurity experts can help you identify any existing weaknesses and provide solutions to address them.
- The Cyber Checkup is designed to help you check and improve your organization’s cyber health in two high-risk areas.
- A Cybersecurity Assessment provides a comprehensive analysis of your cybersecurity risk, including a thorough evaluation of over 100 different controls and a vulnerability assessment to identify any holes.
Be Prepared
While you can’t prevent challenges like cloud outages and natural disasters, careful planning can help you minimize the effect on your data and operations.
- Plan ahead to stay productive during cloud computing outages. This recent article from the Journal of Accountancy has helpful tips, including insight from Lisa Traina, President and Partner of Traina & Associates (now CapinTech). While the article is written for CPA firms, the considerations provided apply to all organizations.
- Develop a disaster recovery plan to ensure ongoing operations after a cyberattack, breach, or natural disaster
Have questions about these or other cybersecurity issues? Please contact us at [email protected]. You can also access additional cybersecurity articles, blog posts, and previous National Cybersecurity Awareness Month email alerts on our website.