YWAM Information Technology

Either you give me your password or you enjoy up to 5 years in jail - what's your choice? Impossible, you think? No, it's a law. But only maybe in a very restrictive country. Sorry, no, that's in Great Britain. Believe it or not.

Here is the article at Heise Security News.

We just had a lively discussion about security and today I came
across an article stating that businesses spent an average of 20% of
their IT expenses on security in 2006. Here is the article at www.itnews.com.au.

For some reason I couldn't post a comment on Kevin's post about Backing UP, so I decided to start a new topic, which in a sense has it's own right.  This last week I was setting up an IMAP account on a MAC and got to the point of installing a SSL Certificate and it asked me for the Power User password, well the user didn't have any password setup. I still cannot believe  what I saw. I still hope I'm wrong in my judgment but how come a Power User is not Obliged to have a password? I mentioned to the owner that at any aiport wireless connection his computer was running a great risk of being hacked.

I was saddened to get an email from Stephe and Rite Mayers who were robbed whilst on holiday in Israel just recently. They seem fine now and have the passports sorted and money issues dealt with but Stephe lost ALL his data.

How much value do we place on our staff members time? How much time is wasted on IT projects in YWAM?

I have previously written that I think outsourcing is a viable option of IT in YWAM.

I wrote this article on my personal blog after experiencing a lot of problems in our ministry area, and thought that it would probably go very well on this site as well.

---

Information Technology has been a constant struggle for us at our base, and I can imagine it could be an even bigger challenge at smaller YWAM bases. One of the challenges we face is that as our base has grown so has our information technology (IT) infrastructure and our reliance on it. Because IT is quite a specialized area it is something that is often hard to find staff for. I have been at it at our location for about 8-years, and it has always been a struggle getting anyone else to stick at it long term.

I have been talking with a few people lately, including David Couper who I have had the privilege to work with quite a lot, and we have both started to think that the only way to make IT sustainable in YWAM is to outsource it.

OK, now it's time for a better strategy. 2 days ago I almost got an heart attack because one of my computers couldn't find my user directory. Well, and guess what.... I had very important things on there which had not been backed up.
My fault, I know.
However, after playing a game of Settlers with some friends and rebooting the computer everything was there. If you want to loose weight it might be a good strategy to not make a backup. But I really need that stuff so I copied everything over to my server. Now I can sleep better. Praise God.