Texaport helps Charity implement Cyber essentials accreditation

Cyber security
Hey Girls

The client

Hey Girls is a social enterprise business, set up by its CEO Celia Hodson and her daughters Becky and Kate. Its clear focus is on tackling period poverty throughout the UK with a philosophy is that no one should ever have to compromise their wellbeing or health.

 

Hey Girls offers environmentally friendly sanitary products to its customers on a ‘Buy One Give One’ basis. For every box sold of product sold, this model enables Hey Girls to donate a box to women low incomes who are struggling to afford sanitary products.

The challenge

Running a successful social enterprise like this requires a robust and reliable IT system and Texaport has been proud to provide its support.

 

Hey Girls first contacted us when they needed to secure Cyber Essentials accreditation to bid for a government contract. A simple but effective certification that guards against a wide range of common cyberattacks, Cyber Essentials is overseen by the National Cyber Security Centre and GCHQ and designed to provide base-level security controls for businesses and organisations of all sizes.

 

Adopting our usual bespoke approach in supporting a client through the Cyber Essentials qualification process, we worked closely with Hey Girls which passed with flying colours and gained the required certification.

The solution

Digital transformation

After this successful initial engagement, Hey Girls asked Texaport to investigate other aspects of its IT set-up where we were able to make a number of highly beneficial changes.  This included moving the business from a Dropbox facility to SharePoint. As well as improving the integration of its file system with their other programs, including Microsoft applications, this measure also ensured that free storage facilities from Microsoft were being fully utilised avoiding the additional cost of paying for Dropbox.

 

Microsoft 365

We also made significant improvements to the social enterprise’s systems by standardising its software. Hey Girls had previously operated with older, individual boxed copies of Microsoft Applications that were no longer maintained by Microsoft and were slowly becoming outdated. There were also different versions in use across its operations which created compatibility issues and inefficiencies within the team. Texaport moved its client to a proper Microsoft 365 licensing agreement which addressed these issues and provided centralised communication and collaboration across its team.

 

Hey Girls woman

 

This consolidation process included Microsoft Teams becoming the default for Hey Girls video conferencing meetings, moving them away from a range of other platforms such as Zoom and Slack. This allowed the business to consolidate its IT applications budget and ensure consistency of approach with the team all using the same software.

 

We also migrated Hey Girls email facility to Microsoft 365, moving from an old supplier which had prevented its people from accessing key functions, including shared mailboxes. With this process completed, team members can also be added or removed from mailboxes quickly and easily.

 

Another beneficial task involved moving Hey Girls to Windows Pro licensing, ensuring the business was compliant with Microsoft terms of service and giving it control over all devices operating across its systems.

 

Cyber security

In an age of increasing cyber attacks, Texaport also helped ensure Hey Girls’ IT environment was protected from harm. We started by updating their antivirus with a solution that was suitable for commercial use. We modified local administrator privileges to further protect its systems from being compromised and we joined all its business devices to a cloud active directory to ensure data could be correctly managed and controlled. Our work included homogenising computer settings so the switch-over from old to new users would be quick and seamless.

The result

With Hey Girls focused on helping women across the UK by eradicating period poverty, the last thing it needs to deal with are IT issues. Texaport’s proactive approach has helped ensure this social enterprise business can continue its inspiring work and further raise its profile without worrying about system downtime or threats to its data security.

 

"This partnership allows us to focus on our mission to combat period poverty, confident in our reliable and secure IT infrastructure"

Celia Hodson CEO, Hey Girls

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