The Wall Street Journal had an interesting post "If You Don't Need It Don't Keep It," referring to the fact that many businesses keep data that they don't need, for marketing and research purposes. The decreasing cost of storage has also increased the propensity to save data rather than to routinely clean it out.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has published a study of Americans' use of "cloud computing," in which data and applications are stored online and are accessible via Web browsers.

As more and more nonprofits move to using hosted customer-relationship management tools (CRMs) and venture into the world of social networking sites where data and privacy is pretty loosely maintained, cloud computing should be on the mind of organizations as well.

The findings of the study include:

The US Department of Homeland Security has designated September as National Preparedness Month. Along with other agencies and organizations, the DHS is encouraging individuals, families, organizations, and businesses to take stock of their preparedness for a disaster, and offers many tips to stay prepared. Every organization should think about and have plans in place for a variety of disaster situations.

In addition, over the next four weeks Agility Recovery Solutions, a business continuity provider, is offering free webinars on:

• 10 Steps to Business Preparedness (Sept 3rd, 2:00 pm ET)
• The Human(e) side of Crisis Management (Sept 10th, 2:00 pm ET)
• How Effective is Your Business Continuity Plan? Stay Informed (Sept 17th, 2:00 pm ET)
• Give Back! Easy Steps to Help Prepare Your Community (Sept 24th, 2:00 pm ET)

For more information on these webinars and to register check out their Web site.

Check out TechSoup's Disaster Planning and Recovery Toolkit for more!

Photo from Flickr user Itinerant

The security of your computers may not be something you think about every day, which is exactly why we're holding a special event at TechSoup — starting today, August 20 — with three ways to help keep your systems safe. A small investment of time and resources now to set up security software can help protect your users, systems, and proprietary data.

Secure your computing environment in three ways:

1. Software: For a limited time, you can request some of Symantec's most popular security products and receive an additional 25% discount on the administrative fee. This special offer is only available while supplies last.

• Read more

CNN is not reporting that their CNN Custom News Alert is being spoofed by spammers — with sometimes outrageous story headlines — but they are. Just this morning, I had a variety of spammy emails using CNN's My Custom Alert banners and some sounded legitimate ("Officials work to ID remains from helicopter crash") and others definitely didn't ("Naked celebs will make your day").

Spywareremove has a detailed blog post about how the spam works to trick the user to downloading malware. The post also includes a simple but effective way to filter them as spam using Outlook rules. The spam's consistency makes it to filter.

Let's hope that those receiving these bogus emails are "alert" enough not be fooled to clicking the links.

**UPDATE: We misspoke when we said that CNN was not reporting the fraudulent spam generated in their name. They blogged about it last week and are directing people, appropriately, to delete the emails before opening.

Being vigilant about protecting your data and infrastructure is important, here are some tips to ensure your computing environment is safe:

As nonprofit organizations often experience more turnover and have staff with more wide-ranging IT skills, security should be just as high as a concern as say a financial services institution or commercial retailer. According to a survey conducted by RSA Conference — an information security conference — 29% of the 300 or so security professionals surveyed stated that they experienced a customer or employee data leakage in 2007, but only 11% of those disclosed the incident — meaning 89% didn't bother reporting it!

Videojug, a how-to video sharing Web site, has a primer video on Computer Security and Malicious Software.

"Hacker X" explains the difference between  pharming, phishing, and other common security threats. A transcript can be found on the main page, and you can skip to chapters within the video for topics that interest you.

Various tech news outlets are reporting the findings of a new report, citing that almost 637,000 notebook computers are lost every year in US airports, amounting to 12,000 a week in big and medium-sized airports.

Any one of those laptops could have serious security consequences if it fell into the wrong hands. What is also alarming is the fact that almost half of the owners surveyed stated that their laptops contained confidential information, and given the many high-profile data loss incidents in recent years, people still aren't storing less data on the laptop itself.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recently published a high level report on the state of malware and how it is affecting, and will affect, the Internet economy. Aimed mainly at policy-makers, the report is also good primer on malware and Internet security for non-technical readers.