Did you know that September is National Preparedness Month? Agility Recovery Solutions, a disaster recovery specialist, together with FEMA, is hosting a series of weekly webinars this month. Readers and followers of TechSoup are no doubt familiar with our resources on disaster planning and recovery, and Agility's webinars introduce some interesting topics as well such as "Pandemic Planning: How to Prepare your Business for the Upcoming Flu Season" with a former associate Chief Medical Officer from the Department of Homeland Security on September 16, and "Social Media: What Role Does It Play in Business Preparedness" with a Public Information Officer from FEMA on Sept 23. The free webinars are also archived in case you can't make those times.

Photo: Robert Thomson, CC license

Earlier this year, we hosted the first Microsoft-TechSoup Show Your Impact Story Contest and I wandted to take a moment to highlight one of the winners. Elliot blogged about another one of the winners last week. As you may have noticed, we've been writing tooklits and guides, conducting webinars, and blogging about different ways to plan and prepare for disasters and emergencies over the past couple of weeks.

This is, in part, because September is National Preparedness Month. It's also in part because it's around this time of year that the news is full of warnings about hurricanes and wildfires and we want to do our part to make sure that nonprofits and libaries have resources especially for them.

Despite the fear that talking about a major natural disaster might evoke, the resources we've been developing and sharing are really intended to help ensure that your organization can be resilient and flexible — able to adapt to any situation quickly, whether it's an emergency or an opportunity.

One such resource, is a project of the Pangea Foundation, one of the winners of that contest I mentioned earlier. They developed something called ReliefPoint, "a real-time communications hub for national disaster relief coordination and information dissemination." They initially created it in response to the October 2007 wildfires that destroyed land and homes in and around San Diego.

Initially, the region relied on all-centers in order to communicate that status of the fires to various agencies, news affiliates, and community members, but they found it to still take too long to get the information turned around. As an alternative, Pangea created (in 3 days) a hub that provided:

The front-page headlines read "Hacker steals Twitter's confidential documents," but the real story isn't about Twitter — it's that the stolen documents were stored online, "in the cloud." This could happen to any nonprofit or company storing data this way. As we've seen over and over, it's amazingly easy to guess or steal passwords. And anyone who gets access to the password of an employee with access to those online files gets access to all files shared with that employee. This can happen with internal network passwords as well, but there are differences:

• IT staff can require secure passwords for their own networks and email systems. They can't control the password requirements for web-based email accounts or cloud computing apps.
• IT staff can require employees to change their network passwords regularly. They can't do that for cloud apps.
• IT staff can test the security of passwords on their own networks. Do they do that with their employees' Google Doc passwords?
• IT can disable email and network accounts for former employees. Does anyone think to disable those employees' access to docs in the cloud?
  
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Have you ever checked out TechSoup's Disaster Planning and Recovery Toolkit? It's a good place to turn for any organization whose tech infrastructure has suffered a disaster, natural or otherwise. We're overhauling the manual and toolkit, and we need your help!

If you have ten minutes to spare, please take our Emergency Preparedness Survey for Nonprofits and Public Libraries. Even if you haven't been impacted by a disaster, your input is still important. We want to learn what steps organizations are going through to protect their computers and data, even if they've been fortunate enough not to experience a disaster.

The survey is completely confidential, but if you are interested in sharing more information, we're also looking for people to interview about their own experiences in disaster preparation and recovery. The survey will give you the opportunity to express your interest in further participation.

We will select one respondent at random to receive a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate. Respond by July 10 to be eligible for the drawing. Please forward this survey to your colleagues at nonprofits, NGOs, or libraries. The survey is open to organizations anywhere in the world.

Photo: Random McRandomhead, CC license

My friend and fellow consultant John Kenyon is fond of saying that, after people, data is an organization's most important asset. An organization's databases store its history: contact records; people served; donors, funders, and prospects; VIPs, volunteers, and vendors; event attendees, and more. Yet many organizations don’t pay enough attention to the care and feeding of their databases.

Without policies, procedures, training, management, and ongoing attention, databases will become filled with inconsistent, unusable data, and data will be scattered hither and yon in spreadsheets, shadow databases, and desk drawers.

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

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.

September is National Preparedness Month, an initiative designed to promote emergency preparedness. Below are some resources you can use to prepare yourself for a natural or man-made disaster.