5 Tips for Maintaining Digital Safety When Offshoring in the Philippines

Offshoring is a rapidly growing industry, known for producing significant savings on labor without sacrificing quality of work. More than 80% of Fortune 500 companies offshore to locations like the Philippines to save up to 70% on their labor costs. It’s projected that the size of the global offshore outsourcing industry will reach $409.7 billion by 2027.

However, by virtue of being overseas, offshoring presents unique data privacy and safety challenges. For starters, there’s all the digital correspondence required, often entailing exchanges of sensitive data about things like trade secrets and proprietary technology. Information sent digitally carries risks of data breaches and privacy vulnerabilities.

Therefore, digital safety needs to be a priority for offshoring companies to maintain the integrity of business systems and information.

Why Digital Safety Is Especially Critical When Offshoring

When operations are offshore, businesses are exposed to additional security risks that go beyond local hiring. These include cross-border data transfers, remote access to internal systems, and differences in cybersecurity regulations between countries. Accounting, customer support, IT, and administrative roles often handle sensitive data daily, making digital safety a foundational requirement rather than an optional safeguard.

A strong digital safety framework helps protect intellectual property, customer data, and internal systems while ensuring regulatory compliance and long-term operational trust.

How to Secure Business Information When Offshoring

Although digital safety may seem intimidating at first, proactive security methods can give you the protection you need against cyber threats. We recommend starting off with these five tips:

1. Use VPNs

Each device has a unique IP address consisting of a string of characters that allow computers to locate where to send or receive the data when you’re using the internet. Sometimes, hackers take advantage of IP addresses for nefarious purposes.

Suppose you’re offshoring virtual assistants in the Philippines to manage your emails and appointments, and you give them login credentials for the tools you’re using. Without proper security protocols, a bad actor can easily find the virtual assistant’s IP address and use it to launch a phishing attack to access your sensitive information.

A phishing attack is a type of scheme where a person impersonates your trusted service provider and sends your virtual assistant an email containing attachments to plant malware in their device. If they infiltrate your system, their actions could result in stolen data, reputational damage, and even financial losses.

Fortunately, a VPN can minimize this risk by creating a secure connection between a user’s device and a remote VPN server. The VPN does this by encrypting the user’s data and masking their IP address, allowing the internet to be accessed privately and securely.

VPN Policies and Access Management

Using a VPN alone is not enough. Businesses should define clear policies on when VPNs must be active, which systems require VPN access, and how credentials are managed.

2. Use Secure Communication Tools

Negligence and lack of awareness of digital safety, especially in your communications, leaves one vulnerable to cyber schemes. Applications like Facebook Messenger may be tempting to use for speedy correspondence, but they lack the security needed to protect business data.

Email Security and File Sharing Controls

Email remains one of the most common entry points for cyberattacks. Businesses should implement spam filtering, attachment scanning, and restrictions on file downloads.