Over the weekend I received an urgent call from the director of a small nonprofit organization. I spoke with her almost 6 months ago about the possibility of migrating their organization to the cloud. She was specifically interested in Salesforce as a tool to manage their members, track donations, and send mass newsletters and Google Apps for emails and joint calendars. After our conversation, she took my proposal to their board and the day after the board meeting she called and expressed some concerns. The vast majority of their board members agreed that “the cloud is too dangerous, it is not secure.” Instead of migrating to Salesforce they bought additional servers and migrated to one of those client/server based databases…
Last week their region experienced some serious thunder storms. Their offices were struck by lightning and “fried” their servers; as a result, the organization lost all of their data (they did not have any backup!) and due to the lost servers, they now don’t have a system to manage their upcoming gala event.
Don’t Confuse Security and Control
People tend to think that if they don’t see their information then it is not secure. Rest assured that your data in the cloud is much more secure than what lives on a tower under your desk.
When you access Salesforce using industry standard Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology, your information is protected using both server authentication and data encryption, ensuring that your data is safe, secure, and available only to registered users in your organization. Salesforce.com’s secure data centers include:
- Access control and physical
- Environmental controls Power control
- Fire detection and suppression
- Network protection
- Backups
- Application vulnerability threat assessments
- Internal and third-party testing and assessments
- And more…
As a nonprofit organization, you should focus on bringing about positive social change to your community- let someone else deal with the IT needs. Contact us today to learn how your organization can move to the cloud
