The biggest risk of a hosted ChMS
When a church moves to a hosted solution for tracking personal data regarding its attenders and contributors, the church’s risk exposure goes way up in at least two areas.
1. Data loss – just because a webhost says they are backing up their clients’ data, does not mean they are doing it regularly. And even if they are backing it up regularly, there are a host of other data-destroying events (earthquake, hurricane, tornado). A hosted solution must provide a means for exporting the data into a format that can be read easily (is this a job for xml?).
2. Data leakage – not even the United States Department of Defense is immune from leaking personal data. In an age of increasing identity theft, data leakage can be just as damaging to a church as data loss. How many social security numbers do you have in your ChMS database?
Dave Stone @ August 1, 2006