Guide to Cybersecurity for Nonprofits

At Makaye, we work with prevention and risk mitigation. This means to think in terms of “when you get attacked,” rather than “if you get attacked.” But, if you’re like many nonprofits, you might not even know how your organization would fare in an attack. Cybersecurity Maturity Level Assessments (SMLAs) exist to help you understand your current level of cybersecurity. An SMLA includes interviews and research to determine where vulnerabilities and risks exist and what security measures are currently in place. The knowledge gained through this assessment will help guide the decisions that will need to be made to improve your security and align your risk with acceptable tolerance levels. Completing an SMLA is an important first step in understanding your organization’s underlying cybersecurity structure and the issues it may have. Without an SMLA, your organization will waste time and money applying security tools that don’t actually address those underlying problems, underlying cybersecurity structure, and the issues it may have. Without an SMLA, your organization will waste time and money applying security tools that don’t actually address those underlying problems. Makaye uses the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework (NIST) and the Center for Internet Security (CIS) to quantify your security maturity. With the NIST framework as a benchmark, your maturity assessment evaluates how well your organization can identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover from cyber threats. Your organization will be placed in one of the five levels below: