As we welcome in 2022 with the team starting back this week, we thought we’d take a look back on 2021 and share our team volunteer work program. One of the Axenic employee benefits we are most proud of is our Employee Volunteer Leave program. This provides the Axenic team with the opportunity to develop their skills and most importantly – give back to our community. In our first blog for 2022, we thought we’d take the opportunity to highlight some of the activities the team has been up to throughout 2021.
Axenic Supported Volunteering Program
As part of the program, the team have allocated time each year to provide cyber security support, advice and services for a deserving organisation of their choice. Throughout 2021 the team have supported various charitable organisations. Here are a few examples of how our team decided to spend their volunteer leave time:
Terry – “This year, I continued to use my volunteer leave to support the Digital Wings Trust as board co-chair. Digital Wings helps repurpose computers donated by businesses to small NZ community groups and charities. 2021 has been a big year for Digital Wings, with the impact of Covid driving more demand for computers from the community groups that we support. Thank you to the generous corporate donors of computers to be recycled.”
Johan – “I used my volunteer day to do some PCI assessment work for Barnardos and Save the Children NZ. It has been great to be able to provide them with a day of donated consulting services as part of the PCI assessment”.
Doug – “As a board member at Volunteer Wellington, I use my IT and cyber security experience to support the great work they do. Volunteer Wellington assists over 380 charitable organisations in managing their volunteers with recruiting, professional development, consultancy, and advocacy. I have used my volunteer hours to attend board meetings, write an information security policy and help Volunteer Wellington lift their cyber security maturity.”
Flynn – “In 2021, I used my volunteer leave to support Barnardos in improving their incident response capability. It isn’t a question of if things go wrong in our industry, but when. We helped Barnardos design an incident management process and ran a whole-day tabletop exercise with incident handlers and senior leadership to enhance the team’s ability to identify, analyse, contain and recover from potential information security incidents.”
Micheal – “I have been working with the Axenic team to develop a lightweight cybersecurity health check for volunteer organisations. We know that it’s near impossible for charities and volunteer organisations to find time and resources to get IT up and running – let alone establish security policies, provide security awareness training, or complete cyber security reviews. So we have been working with a local volunteer organisation to design a free program to help in this space, and plan to offer more openly in 2022”.
As we mentioned at the start, we are very proud of the program and more importantly, the work that the team have been doing. We’d like to encourage other organisations to implement something similar if you are able to. Give us a shout if you are interested in finding out about our Volunteer program and how you can implement something similar into your business.
Happy New Year everyone and we look forward to continuing this program this year and enabling the staff to give back.