Empower yourself with crucial IT insights to protect your business from evolving cyber threats and leverage technology securely, especially in the age of AI.
This course provides a practical and engaging overview of cybersecurity, data privacy, and digital risk management in today’s interconnected business environment. Presented by Chris Nowell, a cybersecurity expert with extensive experience in risk assessment and cyber defense, the session explores how organizations and professionals can protect sensitive information, comply with evolving regulations, and build a strong culture of digital resilience.
Participants gain a clear understanding of the key threats facing modern enterprises, including phishing, ransomware, social engineering, data breaches, and insider risks. The session breaks down how these attacks occur, how criminals exploit human error, and how simple, consistent security practices can prevent significant financial and reputational damage.
The presentation also highlights the intersection between technology, human behavior, and compliance, covering essential frameworks such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), encryption, password management, incident response planning, and business continuity. Emerging topics such as artificial intelligence, cloud vulnerabilities, and data sovereignty are examined in the context of professional responsibility and organizational governance.
With a focus on awareness and accountability, this course helps professionals understand their role in protecting client data, maintaining ethical standards, and ensuring regulatory compliance in an era of constant cyber evolution.
The CPA Small Practitioners’ Forum was created to offer an inviting, semi-causal, and easygoing professional development weekend that provides substantial professional development value to small practitioners. All profit earned by the CPA Small Practitioners’ Forum is donated to the Alberta CPA Education Foundation, so you are helping young people in Canada get scholarships for university. All these courses are reviewed by the delegates at the Forum in Banff annually so we have a great lineup that is adjusted every year to keep things relevant to small practitioners. If you work at a public accounting firm in Canada with employees of 1-50 people, you are our target demographic and you should find this course useful.
IT Security Director at ThreeSheild
Chris Nowell leads ThreeShield Information Security Corporation, which transforms IT and web development so business owners can thrive without worrying about outages, insurance issues, or inevitable cyberattacks. Chris holds Computer Science and MBA degrees along with an alphabet soup of security certifications. Over the last two decades, he’s audited nearly every provincial entity with the Auditor General of Alberta and improved the security of hundreds of organizations around the world, from small accounting firms and websites that process multibillion-dollar annual sales to rocket and military helicopter manufacturers.
Provincial regulators of CPAs in Canada do not require that independent providers of CPD be approved to offer courses. Instead, individual CPAs are responsible for assessing whether a CPD activity meets their requirements, and may take activities from any source provided those requirements are met.
Every course offered on LearnFormula is delivered by a qualified subject matter expert or learning organization, and advances learning objectives that are relevant to the responsibilities or professional competencies of Canadian CPAs. All activities on LearnFormula are quantifiable in terms of hours, and are also verifiable, in that users receive documented evidence of their attendance via a certificate of completion after finishing a course (and this certificate is stored by LearnFormula indefinitely). Nearly 100,000 Canadian CPAs successfully satisfy their CPD requirements via LearnFormula on an annual basis.
