I polled IT professionals from the ForeSite team and beyond to determine what key things every business owner, director of a school or nonprofit should know about their network.  My goal was to create a checklist that will help “nontechnical” people who have the ultimate responsibility of making technology related business decisions and protecting sensitive data to better understand what questions to ask of their IT professionals – whether you rely on an internal IT staff or a technology firm.

Some of the questions are obvious, such as making sure that your critical data is being backed up and that you know important passwords.  But there were also questions that could be eye-opening, such as “what remote access is being allowed?”.  I think back to a meeting with a Head of School when this question was asked, and it was determined that a former vendor and two former employees still had remote access to their server (and the data residing on the server)  simply because no one had thought to regularly audit the remote access and disable accounts that were no longer valid.

We hope this checklist will help you to get the information you need to make informed decisions about your network.  Your comments and questions are welcome!

Tags: CEO/CFO Technology Tips, small business concerns, Technology for nonprofits, technology resource for small business

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2010 at 10:58 am by Tracy Fox and is filed under Disaster Planning, Operations, Technology Budgeting, Technology Planning, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.