Safeguarding your church's electronic property

As good stewards of our church property, buildings and possessions, we work diligently to safeguard and protect them. We do this by making sure that our church buildings are secured, important papers and documents are stored and the beautiful treasures used in our worship are safely locked away.

However, we sometimes overlook one of our most important assets – our electronic information. The information and data we keep on our church computers is priceless to the operation of every congregation. On these computers, we store our membership information, financials, bulletins and other vital information. The Geeks for God blog post The most important program on your computer (February 26, 2014) discusses the importance backing up the information on all church computers in the event of a serious malfunction where data is lost and cannot be recovered. With a regular backup, critical information can be recovered and loaded to another computer where it can be accessed.

In addition to regular backups that can be used to restore data in the event of computer failure, it is also very important to make sure that computers are protected from the “forces of evil” in the outside world. Our computers are vulnerable to countless potential attacks from hackers and other cyber troublemakers looking to potentially steal important information (such as your personal and financial data) or attempting to cause harm to your computer where your information and data can become corrupt or entirely wiped out. This can be accomplished through simple use of the internet, e-mail programs or sharing electronic information with others.

The FBI’s Cyber Division Website offers a number of important tips on how you can protect your computers, both at church and at home, from being attacked. A few of those key tips are:

The site offers other helpful suggestions to protect your computer data at no cost. In the same way we protect our physical property, we owe it to ourselves and our congregations to protect our electronic property – our computer data and files!

• If you receive an email with an attachment and not sure who it is from or seems to be an unusual from a friend, relative or co-worker, think twice about opening it. If it’s from company that you do not normally do business, consider deleting it or try calling the company (if they actually have a phone number in the message), but don’t click on any attachments or links. If the message is from someone you know and seems out of context, you might want to call them first to see if they actually sent it.

• If you find yourself on a website that is offering software that seems too good to be true, that is most likely the case. Be very careful downloading programs from the Internet, especially if they are free. You can often find out whether or not if software is the “real thing” by doing a search on the software name using a search tool such as Google or Bing.

• Be sure that your computer has up to date virus protection and anti-spyware protection programs. These generally require that you pay an annual license and maintenance fee, but consider it a very wise investment.