Four IT Challenges Not-For-Profits Struggle with – And Some Ways Forward

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Challenge 1: It boils down to BYOD

Enabling not-for-profit volunteers to digitally collaborate, communicate and contribute throws up a thorny problem – the cost and risk of equipping them with expensive hardware and devices.

The alternative, however – allowing volunteers to use their own devices as part of a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) program – can quickly ratchet up the hidden background costs, because of administrative complexity.

Multiple logins often need to be created, and then manually managed. User profiles typically cannot be easily adapted to give each user risk-managed levels of access to only the data and applications they need to perform their role.

Scaling capacity and storage up and down to cope with spikes in temporary use often cannot be done quickly or easily, as it requires users to log out and back in again (which, if you’re dealing with thousands of different users, each using multiple logins, as described above, becomes a Herculean task!)

BYOD may seem like the only workable way forward, but the devil’s in the detail – and not-for-profits need help to properly understand how to keep the hidden costs and complexity at bay.

Challenge 2: Scalability can be a waste of space

Against this backdrop of spike-and-trough usage, it might seem that infrastructure scalability is IT nirvana for not-for-profits, but in fact scalability when it’s not needed can incur significant unnecessary costs.

What’s missing from the not-for-profit IT teams’ armoury here is the ability to understand when they need growth within their IT infrastructure, and how much growth they need, so that they can better control pressure on resources and manage down costs within a planned delivery schedule.

But this insight, although already “out there” in some IT platforms, is by no means standard. It requires advanced, built-in data analytics to predict usage trends. It requires intelligent load-balancing, so that service capacity is delivered when and where it’s needed most.

The “vanilla” infrastructure solutions used by many not-for-profits just don’t cut the mustard.

Challenge 3: Data – a massive insider risk

Whilst salaried corporate workers are typically immersed in an internal culture of security training that is highly persuasive, (i.e. ignore it and you could be fired), not-for-profit volunteers are not.

With the long arm of data protection law reaching ever further under GDPR legislation, and insider data breaches proving every bit as dangerous as external threats, this is an acute concern for many not-for-profit organisations.

Yet most IT infrastructures in use by not-for-profits have little, if any, real protection against either deliberate or accidental internal data disasters, whether that be information stolen, compromised, removed, or deleted from backups.

Essentially, not-for-profits need to insulate themselves against this internal risk by choosing an IT infrastructure that can totally isolate data, applications and devices from internal users, devolving their management instead to the infrastructure service provider.

This way, a physical “air gap” is created – a defensive void around data and applications that halts any compromises in their tracks until the issue can be resolved.

Challenge 4: Storage and backup – the network’s worst enemy

But data isn’t just a security risk – it’s an organisational performance risk, too.

Proliferating storage and backup files rob space from the valuable production data resources that underpin the organisation’s core activities.

In addition, the transient and volunteer users on which not-for-profits heavily rely are likely to organise and use file storage less efficiently and systematically than permanent employees, swelling the data duplication that ultimately impairs the network’s ability to operate.

Moving storage, backup and archiving to the cloud is an effective way of cheaply freeing up network resources for the data that really matters on a day-to-day level.

Navigating the not-for-profit IT challenges

Perhaps the most important IT advice for not-for-profit organisations is that complex challenges cannot be met by a simple sell – no matter how clever the cloud!

A demonstration of how rapidly users can be onboarded, for example, is useful for understanding one aspect of how to manage the IT needs of a population that is often in seasonal flux.

But for broader transparency around whether the solution is a genuine fit for the organisation, more engagement and interactivity than a simple demo is needed. Users need to be able spend time “hands-on” with the solution and its supplier – and without incurring prohibitive upfront costs that spell short-termism.

When it comes to charities’ IT challenges, hope is not a strategy. But faith – in the right provider – is.

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