With a shortage of IT talent in the UK, charities face an uphill battle to attract staff against inflated corporate wages available to IT professionals elsewhere. Many IT teams are finding it harder to source, fund and retain the multidisciplinary mix of specialist skills needed to run a modern not-for-profit’s technology estate. We undertook a…
Last week we hosted the first of our Quarterly Charity Technology Roundtables, with Microsoft Tech for Social Impact and Charity Finance Group. In this blog, we summarise our discussion on managing IT budgets, staff retention, and measuring the value of IT, and provide information about our upcoming events. Recruitment & retention Colleagues were aligned that…
Welcome to the Smartdesc March newsletter. Lots of organisations are asking us about how they can move their telephony into Microsoft Teams and refresh their internet connectivity ahead of the traditional phone network switch off in 2025, so we’ve compiled the following resources for you: A non-technical guide on how to move telephony into Teams, and…
Email is not secure 91% of all cyber attacks begin with email. Despite all the advances in cyber defence, good old-fashioned email still provides an open door for attackers to knock on. Email is your biggest security risk by a long way. Finance staff frequently use email and they deal with money on a daily…
Charities are increasingly being targeted by cyber criminals. According to the Cyber Security Breaches Report 2022, 19% of charities reported they had been attacked in 2018. This has now risen to 30% of charities reporting attacks in 2022. But why are charities targeted? And what can they do to mitigate against cyber threats and reputational…
Welcome to the Smartdesc January newsletter. We are NCVO-approved IT experts specialising in the charity sector, enabling nonprofits to achieve more with technology and modern ways of working. This month we focus on how charities can be more cyber secure and offer the following resources: A framework on how to prepare should you ever experience…
Picture this: Your charity has just been hit by a ransomware attack. Your files are all encrypted, staff are locked out of their computers, and hackers are demanding a substantial ransom to restore everything, otherwise they will release your beneficiary data onto the internet. As scary and unlikely as this may sound, charities are increasingly…
The data charities hold is highly valuable, but internal cyber security resources are often limited. It is unsurprising, then, that over 30% of charities reported cyber security breaches or attacks last year, according to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. A significant increase from 19% in 2018. Smartdesc can quickly scale up your…
Cyber Security Training For Charities & Not For Profit Organisations The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) recommends regular cyber security training for all staff, yet the quality and cost of this often makes it prohibitive, especially for non-profits. At Smartdesc, we offer Cyber Security Training and Data Protection e-Learning specifically for charities. All the content is created by…
Welcome to the Smartdesc December newsletter. We are NCVO-approved IT experts specialising in the charity sector, enabling nonprofits to achieve more with technology and modern ways of working. This month we focus on how charities can simplify and consolidate their IT infrastructure, reduce costs and use technology to enable better hybrid working. We recently migrated the national…
