Quick win, not massive overhaul. This fall too many small nonprofits and SMBs are still getting tripped up by basic cyber hygiene—phishing, orphaned accounts, missed backups—yet many of those risks can be reduced with low-cost, low-friction automation and clearer processes. If you have limited staff, a handful of simple automations can buy time, reduce human error, and make audits much less painful.
Why now? October’s cybersecurity attention brought free training offers for nonprofits and renewed grant opportunities for security upgrades, and vendors are shipping new automation-heavy features aimed at smaller IT teams. Those developments mean affordable help and funding are available—if you prioritize the right small fixes first.
Five practical automations you can set up this week
- Automated MFA checks and alerts. Make a simple script or use your admin console to report users who don’t have multi-factor auth enabled, then automate an email reminder and a follow-up escalation to a manager if it isn’t turned on within X days. This avoids manual spreadsheets and closes a top phishing vector.
- Onboard/offboard workflows. Create a checklist that triggers account provisioning and, critically, deprovisioning: mailbox, shared drive access, Slack, CRM entries. Automate the offboard path so accounts move to a “suspended” state automatically after a termination step and tick a calendar reminder for a final access review.
- Phishing-report automation. Have staff forward suspected phishing to a single mailbox that automatically opens a ticket, flags the sender, and lets you push a block rule across mailboxes. Even basic email rules + a lightweight ticketing flow/zap reduces the time from report to lockout.
- Scheduled access reviews. Automate a quarterly report of admins and high-privilege users into a spreadsheet and email it to leadership for sign-off. A repeating calendar invite plus an auto-generated CSV means reviews actually happen instead of becoming “we’ll do it next quarter.”
- Backup-health and restore drills. Automate a daily/weekly report from your backup system into Slack or email that highlights failures. Add a quarterly automated “restore test” checklist so someone is reminded to verify a restore—backups that aren’t tested aren’t backups.
Where to start (two priorities)
1) Pick one people-facing risk (like phishing) and automate the reporting + containment loop. 2) Pick one account-risk (onboarding/offboarding or MFA) and automate the checks and escalations. These two moves stop the most common mission-stopping incidents for small teams.
Vendors are making automation more accessible for MSPs and small IT teams, so watch for features that let you plug these checks into existing tools rather than building anything heavy from scratch. Recent vendor releases highlight that automation + security is becoming table stakes for products aimed at smaller organizations.
Finally, take advantage of the free nonprofit training and security funding windows open this season—both can help you formalize the automations and get volunteer or pro help if needed. If you start with small, repeatable automations and measure the time and risk you save, you’ll build confidence (and a budget case) to do more next year.
Short checklist to copy:
- Enable MFA + automate reminders
- Automate onboarding/offboarding checklist
- Route phishing reports to an automated ticket/containment flow
- Schedule quarterly access reviews via automated report
- Automate backup health alerts and quarterly restore tests
Small automation choices, steady wins. Start with one, document it, and build from there.
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