Hi everyone and welcome to my YouTube channel, my name is Paula, and I’m from Beyond the Maze.  We are a virtual assistant and online business management service based in Brisbane, Australia with both an onshore and an offshore team members. 

Today, I’m going to be talking to you about the privacy and security of using a virtual assistant. 

Some of you might be a little bit hesitant to use a virtual assistant or an online business manager due to the privacy and security of things.  You might be a bit more comfortable having somebody in your office with you, where you can keep an eye on them and watch and see what’s happening.  But you can’t do that all the time, right? 

If you had time to sit there and watch somebody do what they were doing every single second of the day, then you wouldn’t be hiring help. 

I wanted to put your mind at ease and assure you that when you’re working with a VA or an OBM, our security is pretty much paramount.  We want to make sure that the experience that you have working with us is as seamless as possible so that you get the assistance that you want to run your business. 

Now, a virtual assistant or an OBM will use things such as LastPass, which is password-saving software.  There’s LastPass or DashLane, there’s quite a few of them out there in the world and you’ve just got to do your due diligence, and make sure that they’re good ones and they’ve been around for a while.  They’ve got a good reputation. 

We use LastPass and we will recommend, highly recommend you use LastPass as well.  We’ve been using it for years and it’s a great platform. 

LastPass is somewhere you can share all your passwords.  What we do is we say share your passwords with one person, usually me because I am the business owner, I have the main platform of LastPass and then I share that password with the team. 

The way we share it with the team is they don’t even know that password.  If you decide to leave us, then all we do is shut down the LastPass password. 

The other way of doing it, which isn’t as effective, but you have more security over it is you set up your own LastPass account and then share that with us.  And then I share it with my team as well. 

There’s a certain amount of setting up that has to be done around that, but it certainly can be done.  For ease of how it works, we usually set it up here and then I’ll share it with the team members who are looking after you. That way it all kind of clicks in.  If they leave us, I can just shut it down.  They don’t get access to LastPass anymore.   

There are a lot of security benefits to LastPass – that’s pretty much the crux of everything.  LastPass is going to give you access to your online drives, your programs, and everything because everything’s going to be in there. 

The other thing you could be doing is obviously saving things onto the cloud.  Please make sure you’ve got some backup process as well. 

This is also useful because if something happens where you don’t want to work with us or another VA anymore, you can just change those passwords and we can’t get into them anymore. 

Not that that’s ever happened to us, but especially if there are people that you might end up falling out with and things just don’t work that well or the trust just isn’t there.  You might be a bit worried about that. 

That’s important to just make sure you do your due diligence with a VA or an OBM to make sure that they’ve got the right security settings in place and they’re doing the right things.  Make sure if they’ve got cyber insurance or not because you want to make sure if their systems are hacked that it’s covered in being able to recover any data or anything like that. 

We don’t generally store anything on our systems because we’ve got access to your systems, and we’ll save all the documents in your systems.  There are a few clients where we’ll save into our files, but we’ll end up uploading them to other files and that’s just for ease of saving, but not many as most of them are saved straight into their OneDrive or iCloud or Google Drive or whatever you’re using. 

Email is the same thing.  Make sure you’re set up with a good reputable email service like Google or Outlook or Zoho or things like that.  Use a well-known provider and make sure that you’ve got backups in place.  Speak with your IT people about that as well.  You should be sharing that access with the VA and OBM and then if they leave or we leave, then you can just shut that down straight away. 

These are just a few little tips around privacy and security settings and things like that. 

Of course, privacy with us, nothing is shared with other people.  For us, our main clients are psychologists, and we’re using all these different psychology platforms every single day and we don’t share any of that information.  Of course, we have got it all set out in our contracts to make sure everything’s private, confidential and as secure as it can be. 

If you’re looking at discussing more about using a VA or an OBM and that’s put your mind at ease about the security and privacy around those things, then reach out to us!  Book an appointment and let’s have a chat about how we could help you. https://beyondthemaze.com.au/contact/book-a-free-consultation

I’m Paula, from Beyond the Maze.   

Bye for now.