IT for Charities & NFPs

Todays workplaces are faced with challenges every day because of the introduction of new technologies. It can be difficult to keep up with the steady stream of new advances and even trickier to know which ones could, with correct usage, make your office life easier.

Take Skype for example. Skype – and other similar services such as Gizmo – allow users to make telephone calls over the internet to other users of the same service free of charge. This communication method has its benefits although there are a few potential downsides that you need to consider as well.

Services such as Skype are fast gaining in popularity. Calling between computers both using the chosen service is completely free, obviously an appealing feature to many people. Most of the services also offer the ability to call “normal” telephone numbers (mobile or land lines) at fairly competitive rates – often really competitive for international calls. Some providers also provide an additional service that (for a monthly or yearly fee) provides you with an incoming phone number. This is a fantastic way to get a number in (depending on the provider) the town or country you want – giving you a pseudo-presence there and making it cheaper for you colleagues, or supporters in that area to call you.

However, though the services are generally reliable, we would not advise relying on them as your only method of telephony – incoming or outgoing. If the service does fail (as happened for several days last year to many SkypeIn users for example) you will be left without any method of telephone contact – which not only will cause major inconvenience but does little for your professional profile.

According to the majority of users the audio is generally superb but the big question is really is it secure to use in an office environment? Each provider will have their own individual security features, so let’s take Skype as an example.

When calling Skype to Skype the calls are strongly encrypted so therefore at the higher end in the security stakes compared to other things that use the internet. If using Skype to call to mobile or landlines however, the calls are only encrypted for the Skype portion and not when they hit the public domain. This is fine if you have offices dotted about the country, or world, and you can implement a company-wide policy of Skype usage between offices, but if you are a smaller organisation mainly communicating with customers using a regular landline/mobile service you cannot guarantee the complete security of the conversations. This is not to say that using Skype is more of a threat to charities than other ‘techie’ tools, such as email, but because Skype is newer the vulnerabilities may not be as well known.

Compliance and protection of information within organisations is also a hot topic these days. Organisations need not only to know what information is entering and leaving the office but also to log and archive it as well. It is difficult for third party applications (ie monitoring tools) to interface with Skype. This makes it very difficult to know exactly what information is entering or leaving the organisation. Sensitive information could be passed on with no way of tracking where and from whom it originated.

Perhaps the answer is not to ban Skype flat-out but if you are going to consider its use, then control it – as you do with email. Policies on acceptable usage, such as no file transfers, and cautions against using it for sensitive communications, should be written and enforced.

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