How to Secure Your Data When Using Subcontractors

For today’s tech tip, I want to talk about ways that you can share data and keep it under control whenever you’re using an outsourced third party. For example, a broker who has multiple number of real estate agents that work underneath him. Stay tuned.
Specifically, I want to talk about how you secure files in two different industries. It’s really going to have a much broader application, but if I say to these two industries I think you’ll get the point.
So first off, I met with a person that does private investigations. They outsource certain parts of the private investigation, such as the videoing. Let’s just say that this is for a company and they’re looking for fraud in workers compensation. So this person gets a job with a particular insurance company, and then they’re outsource the work to a third party investigator who goes out to film and maybe even kind of follow the person around to try to catch them doing something. You know, they say they have a bad back but are caught throwing a cast net or something. The second is in the real estate industry where a broker is using real estate agents in order to sell property. Both of these categories have very sensitive data that’s being exchanged. And what you don’t want to do is you don’t want them using their personal email accounts. You don’t want the subcontractor using their personal Dropbox accounts. You don’t want them passing this information on their equipment with no backup and no way to log where these files are.
It’s almost like you’re just taking these very sensitive files that are ultimately these business owners, this broker and the head of this investigation firm, they’re responsible for these files and they’re just letting them be cast wherever with no tracking or anything.
So what you do want to do and this is the part I really want you to hear me say. You can use something as easy as Microsoft 365 configured in the proper way. Set up a domain and allow the Microsoft 365 platform to put the security parameters around there for you. First of all, use a corporate email address for all of those transactions that has that Personal Identifiable Information or private information in it.
You need to have that filtered so that the links are being checked, the attachments are being checked, and the spam is being blocked, as well as the ability to send secure email. Because if you don’t give your people away to do that, they will never do it. Or if they do, they’ll do it in a very dangerous fashion. And then secondly, you want to make sure that is backed up so that if you got sideways with that employee, they couldn’t delete everything and you not know what’s going on. So you need that Office 365 tenancy backed up. You can also share documents and communication by using Microsoft Teams. So you’ve got a secure channel that will work on a computer. It’ll work on a mobile phone or a tablet. So you can securely share and track the files that are in play there. And really, when you look at how teams work, it is basically going into the person’s one drive that is ultimately on SharePoint so that you could have access to these files even via the web.
So there’s some really great ways that you can do this that will actually enhance the overall performance of the organization and keep you legal. If you got more questions, I’d be happy to help, but don’t let a challenge like this put your company at risk. Thank you for watching.

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