Risk vs Agility

Deloitte provided me with access to an experts in online copyright and cybersecurity, which helped me to better understand the nature of risk.

As a small but growing charity, our main concern was the limits of what we can use for educational purposes that is taken from other people. At the moment we produce our products relatively quickly. Our agility works well for us because it allows us to respond to the news. Copyright checks could endanger this model as it sometimes takes weeks or even months to secure copyright clearance from some authors and publishers. Some larger companies have entire departments dedicated entirely to this task.

We had a similar dilemma with upping our cyber security. Obviously we want to be secure as possible. However the maximum level of security comes with costs, both financial and in terms of ease of use for us and people who use our products.

Luckily, Deloitte’s experts were on hand to advise us about the best options. On copyright law, I got a clear overview of which exceptions apply to us and what to look out for in terms of risks, which allowed me to produce guidelines on the re-use of other people’s work. Following these rules will reduce the risk of our products being subject to a copyright claim down to a minimum.

On cybersecurity, we were able to find a middle way that upped our security significantly, but we decided to forego some of the most secure solutions, mainly because of the cost in money and time.

Getting advice from real experts meant that I came out of those conversations happy that we can continue to strike a nice balance between risk and remaining quick and agile in the production of our educational resources. The conversations highlighted that risk is ultimately something we have to accept, particularly because we cannot afford every solution out there, but we can keep it to a minimum.