Myth #3, Data Security and Privacy, could be at risk with outsourcing. This is something a lot of people are concerned about.

Topic – Busting the outsourcing myths

Mentor – Mark Engelmann

• Security is key
• Data is locked
• Passwords are secured

Transcript:

Kevin: It’s Wednesday morning, good morning and welcome to REUNCUT, the show each day presented in association with Property Tree from Rock End, Print Force, Beepo, Locked On and View. You can listen on line anytime, but if you subscribe you’re going to receive advice about bonus shows, lots of them coming out. Find us at Facebook and Twitter as Real Estate Uncut.

Print Force of course presenting Marketing Monday every Monday. They are the complete marketing solutions for agents and agencies and now with campaign manager it’s all at your fingertips, use the button on any one of the pages on REUNCUT. Let’s get underway.

Speaker 2: More thoughts now from this week’s mentor.

Kevin: Well the Internet’s been fantastic for a lot of reasons. One, it’s opened up great opportunities for us, but it’s also opened up a lot of what are perceived to be threats to our security. No more so than one of the myths that we’re going to deal with this morning in terms of outsourcing and that is Myth #3, Data Security and Privacy, could be at risk. This is something a lot of people are concerned about. So joining me to talk about that, as he has been all this week, Mark Engelmann from Beepo, one of our supporters, one of our sponsors and you contact Beepo by using any one of the links on any one of the pages, right here at REUNCUT. Mark, good morning and welcome to the show again.

Mark: Good morning Kevin, thanks for having me.

Kevin: Let’s talk data security. How can we be sure what we’re doing with Beepo is going to be nice and secure.

Mark: Yes right, so, this is, for very good reason, always a big concern for people looking to outsource.

Kevin: Because when you think about it Mark, and sorry to interrupt you there, but you’ve got to give across…especially if they are doing social media or maybe even in property management doing a bit of banking, you’ve got to give them a lot of pass codes.

Mark: Yeah, I think people will be blown away if they ever went to the Beepo office and had a look at how we manage security. We’ve got a full time, 24/7 security guard at the front desk of our office. He searches everyone’s bags when they come in, to make sure that staff aren’t taking mobile devices, USB drives, even things like pens and pencils and paper up into the office area.

Anything that they can take that can be used to record information, they are required to put in their own personal locker outside of the operations area at Beepo.

And that’s purely designed, that sort of clean desk policy, is purely designed to prevent anyone from having the tools to take information out of the office. There’s fingerprint scanners that only let staff into the office, so if you’re not a staff member or an approved visitor, you can’t get into the Beepo office.

We have CCTV throughout the entire building. So already you’re beginning to get a picture of how secure the facility is, in comparison to an office in Australia it’s like ten times more secure. Software applications that all of our staff have, we have a software application called Beepo Secure, and what that does is it remembers…you put all the passwords into Beepo Secure for all of the applications that the staff member needs to access.

So what that means is that staff member doesn’t actually know what the log-in details are for any of your applications, and you can also lock Beepo Secure down by IP address. And what that means is that you can lock it down so that person can only access those applications within Beepo Secure, in the Beepo office, within their work span of hours.

So if they work 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., then it’s only between those hours for example, that they can access the clients applications. So they can’t access them from home and start downloading databases and all that sort of stuff.

The other thing that I would say is, a lot of people are concerned about their database. It takes a lot of time for a business to build their databases that they are in. And what I would say is that I would be more concerned about someone in Australia working in your office doing something undesirable with that database, than someone overseas in the Philippines.

I’ve struggled for the last five, six years that we’ve been involved in the outsourcing industry to try and work out what would a Filipino actually do a list of Australian-

Kevin: Uh-huh (affirmative).

Mark: …customers.

Kevin: It goes deeper than just the CRM, too. I mean, in rent rolls as an example, you have a complete rent roll, which is the value of the business.

Mark: Yeah.

Kevin: And you don’t want that being picked up or used by anyone else, or even to communicate other than what it is when you’re using it within the agency.

Mark: Yeah, that’s right. Again technology has really come a long, long way. And has allowed real estate agents and other sort of small to medium businesses the ability to offshore and really manage that data security risk really, really well. I’ve always said data security, it’s a risk, and it should be in the risk management plan of any business. And it’s just treated as a risk, you’ll never get rid of it completely, but you can manage it as best as possible.

And I think when looking at an outsourcing provider, that’s always going to be a big one. It should be top of mind is, “what is that provider actually doing? To manage that data security risk?”, and we’ve got heaps of information on our website that goes into a lot of detail about what we do.

Kevin: Yeah, well see, there’s the benchmark for you. And if you want to know a little bit more about outsourcing, and in particular Beepo, once again recommend that you book into that study tour which is on June 12 and 13. It will take you straight into the Beepo office, once you get past all the security, and you can have a look around at what they do, how they do it, how best you can bring people onboard.

It’s a great opportunity for you. Just use anyone of the buttons on REUNCUT and it’ll tell you more about the study tour on June 12 and 13, that’s coming up very, very soon.

Mark Engelmann is my guest. Tomorrow we’re going to talk about current staff feeling a little bit threatened. Mark, that’s going to be an interesting topic. I’ll talk to you in the morning.

Mark: Great, Thank Kevin.

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Jet: Joshua Marine says, “Challenges are what make life interesting, and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful”. Go out there and make life meaningful today and embrace challenges. I’m Jet Xavier, have a great day.

Kevin: Thanks, Jed. That’s it for today. Thanks for your company, look forward to catching up again tomorrow morning.