Free online resource helps charities to keep remote working systems secure

This article is sponsored by Okta for Good - the social arm of Okta, offering industry-leading technology, and specialising in Identity and Access Management solutions.

Following the outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent UK-wide lockdown, more charities are working remotely than ever before. With the situation escalating quickly over the past few weeks, charities have had to make this transition with very little notice. Many organisations have not had time to properly examine their remote security protocols.

Even with the best of intentions, there’s no doubt that your home computer, or a laptop borrowed from the office, is less secure than one running in your workplace under the watchful eye of dedicated IT staff. Many charity employees are remotely signing into systems that hold sensitive data relating to service users, beneficiaries and donors. Charities have a legal and ethical duty to secure and protect this data.

New procedures must be put in place. Many charity IT professionals will not be able to manually verify the identity of users. With large numbers of employees signing into systems remotely, many of them on devices previously never logged or registered by these systems, even charities with IT departments may find their resources too stretched to verify the identity of these devices and their users.

Employees may be accessing data in a way that is not secure; normal security procedures - such as getting transactions checked by a nearby colleague - are no longer possible, and frustrated staff who are struggling to access the applications and data that they need to get their jobs done may be tempted to use shortcuts and workarounds to problems that are convenient but insecure.