Upgrading Your Nonprofit’s Technology for a COVID-19 World

ESC’s Director of Communications, Katherine Cruise, had virtual “sit down” with Jacques Ouimet, a volunteer technology consultant, and discussed how nonprofits can adapt their technology during the pandemic.

Katherine: With me today is Jacques Ouimet, a volunteer technology consultant at Empower Success Corps (ESC), who has looked at the changes required to operate in the new COVID-19 environment. Jacques, how did this project start?

Jacques: It all started when Julie Crockford, President of ESC, asked me to take a look at the technology used by employees. They were all working from home and were experiencing problems and issues that did not appear when working in a traditional office environment. For example, they may be using an old version of Word, or a free Excel replacement, causing issues when exchanging documents. And one day hopefully, the employees may start working part time in the office and part time from home, so there needs to be a way to make that totally seamless.

Katherine: Did you look just at the user technology then?

Jacques: To do this right you have to look at the whole environment including software used, hardware, network and security.

Katherine: What were some of your first observations?

Jacques: First, I was happy to see that ESC had moved to cloud services for all of their business. They use Office 365, Salesforce, Dropbox, and their accounting software provider had recently moved them to a cloud solution as well. This is key, since users can work from anywhere without having to connect back into the office. It also obviated the need for servers and other complex technology in the office.

Katherine: Any other observations on their technology?

Jacques: Like many other nonprofits, they tend have older equipment that is not always up-to-date. In this case, some devices are running Windows 8.1 and need to be upgraded to 10. They also could improve their Office 365.

Katherine: What do you mean by that last statement?

Jacques: Office 365 (now called Microsoft 365) has a very complicated licensing arrangement that fluctuates over time. I’ll spare you the gory details but ESC had a Business Basic license (which are free through TechSoup), however those have limitations. I recommended that they add Business Premium licenses for their employees (first ten licenses are free). This gives them a lot more functionality such as the ability to download all the office applications through a simple click on the 365 website. More importantly for COVID-19, this allows users to download all the apps on their personal laptops, desktops or tablets. That way all users are using the same version of Word, Excel, etc., no matter what device they are using. They are also seeing the same experience in Teams, OneDrive etc.

Katherine: What about the network?

Jacques: Previously, the network in the office was the critical component connecting users to servers and other devices. But with COVID-19, having to connect back (using VPN) into that network from home is a major difficulty for most users, so it is best avoided. With everything in the cloud though, the office network becomes simpler, not much different from your home network. In fact, if the office network behaves like your home network, then moving back and forth between home and office will become transparent.

Katherine: Does that not create a security issue?

Jacques: Many nonprofits use an intelligent firewall, such as a SonicWall, between the Internet and their network. This is needed if you are trying to protect data on servers inside your office. But if your users are working from home, the firewall is not protecting anything, and you might as well get rid of it. The solution is to enhance the protection on the end user devices themselves. That means strong malware protection, improved email filtering, and control over the native firewall in Windows. As it turns out, the 365 Business Premium license includes all of these features.

Katherine: Is that not a bit of a controversial recommendation?

Jacques: The level of security should be based on understanding the risk for an organization. For ESC, we estimate the risk to be low since they do not store restricted data subject to HIPAA or other regulations, they do not retain credit card data, and they have no data stored on their network. But other nonprofits do retain some or all of this data. For those, I would recommend a cloud-based network security solution that provides full firewall functionality from any location or device. You can get these solutions as a service (WebRoot, or ZScaler for larger organization) or as a product that requires a virtual server such as Sophos.

Katherine: Is it going to be a lot of work to implement these changes?

Jacques:  This is pretty straightforward and simple to do but requires some administration knowledge of 365. ESC has some of that but also has a good support partner to help them through the changes.

Katherine: That was interesting and a great solution for ESC. Thank you, Jacques.