Case study: how to safeguard sensitive user data

The Dreadnought Centre is a medium-sized charity working with children, young people, and their families experiencing difficulties in their lives, be it emotional, behavioural or physical.

The charity’s work looks beyond behaviour and provides support to explore and recognise feelings and emotions.

The Centre provides a wide range of specialised services, including an anger management programme, self-esteem building and post-abuse work, as well as support for bereavement, eating disorders and gambling issues.

Their one-to-one support pairs service users with a non-judgemental adult to listen and support them unconditionally. They work to help children and young people, such as those with behavioural issues, understand their feelings and make the changes in their lives that they want to see.

Group work allows children and young people to learn social skills. These skills include learning to share, take turns, negotiate, understand the need for rules and boundaries, accepting the opinion of others and building the confidence to express their opinions in a healthy and constructive way.

They also have a programme called Aspires that works with children and young people with a diagnosis of an Autism Spectrum Condition and of Mainstream Educational ability. This consists of group work focused on social skills with the aim of moving on into mainstream activity of their own choice.

All charities have a legal and ethical duty to protect sensitive data relating to service users and beneficiaries, but for charities like The Dreadnought Centre, that work with vulnerable young people, this duty of care is especially important.

Confidentiality and trust are vital for the work that The Dreadnought Centre does. Safeguarding sensitive user data to maintain this confidentiality requires business-level endpoint protection software.

A breach would not only compromise the integrity of their services – it would cause irreparable damage to the charity’s reputation and would result in a severe loss of funding. For this reason, The Dreadnought Centre, and other charities like them, require best in class cyber security systems.

Using the right tech for safeguarding

The Dreadnought Centre were looking to make a change in their antivirus software due to the spiralling costs they were experiencing as the organisation grew.

With the focus on the budget, as well as the need to look after their data, the organisation decided to purchase Avast Business Antivirus, accessing it at a discount on the Charity Digital Exchange. 

Working across a dispersed team with varying levels of IT skills, Avast CloudCare appealed to decision-makers at The Dreadnought Centre. They were able to set up their new systems quickly and easily, and make sure that remote workers were fully-protected. They are also able to remotely initiate virus scans at regular intervals to safeguard against new threats.

“One of the problems is ensuring that our staff are keeping on top of updating. Using the Avast tools we can push updates and virus scans centrally and our users do not need to have many skills to do so.”

 

- Ben Mumford, The Dreadnought Centre

The Dreadnought Centre found Avast CloudCare’s intuitive dashboard easy to use and benefitted from a number of features. They were able to configure alerts for important issues and immediately send email/SMS messages to affected parties, improving reaction time and thus limiting exposure.

The ability to remotely manage security for all devices with the CloudCare agent was particularly useful. With Avast CloudCare, policy changes will automatically configure themselves on the agent-controlled devices in real time, requiring less maintenance and making it easier to scale business operations – exactly what The Dreadnought Centre required as their organisation grew.

Like many small-to-medium-sized charities, The Dreadnought Centre was also faced with a number of challenges in quickly digitising service delivery in the wake of COVID-19.

Organisations that adapt successfully to any rapid change are able to do so because of good underlying systems. With Avast Antivirus and Avast CloudCare, the team at The Dreadnought Centre was able to secure remote systems and safeguard sensitive user data when moving to a new way of working.

They are now offering remote service delivery through conference call software.