Ep. 364: Using VPNs and Remote Desktops for your OFS

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 364, using VPNs and remote desktop with your OFS. So I get asked about a good VPN regularly. You guys want to know about giving your ofs access to websites that are filtering by country? Or letting your ofs log in to sites that they can't log into because they're filtering by country? Or how they can access restricted content that is only available in your country and not available in the Philippines. And so, years ago, I used to love solving problems like this. I used to love figuring out VPNs and how they worked and what's the best one. And I'd research it myself and I'd have my ofs try things. And I loved solving technical problems. But the further I got into my business, the more I valued my time. And technical research takes energy and time, it takes mental energy. And I want to spend that time and energy with my family. So rather than spending my time figuring this out, I just sent this problem to two people on my team to Jam and dec, both in the Philippines. And I asked them to give me answers to these technical questions. Then I sent their answers to Julia, who summed it up for me. So that's a little bit of an example of how I work and what you can do as you hire ofs on your team. Here are the answers to how do I give my people access to whatever it is that's filtering by country? So, so, number one, VPNs. With a good VPN, your OFs can mask their IP address, or they can make it look like their computer is in whatever country they need to be in to access that content. The VPN is a server in that country with an IP address in that country. All content will flow through that server and then to their computer. So to the service on the other end, it looks like your OFS is in that country. And I personally have used VPNs to watch content on, well, specifically on Red Bull Media that was only available to other countries, not available in the us. I signed up for a vpn, I connect to it, and that puts my TV or my phone or whatever in that country, or at least that's what Red Bull Media thinks. And so now I can watch the content. And this is how people get around Netflix barriers, where things are specifically only allowed in certain countries. Well, you sign up for a VPN and you get yourself into that country. VPN, which stands for Virtual Private Network. They're cheap, like $3 a month for your OFS to use one. Now, I don't really have a recommendation for which VPN. And I'll be honest, if you go searching online for the best VPN or anything of the sort, every single site you're going to find is going to be affiliate driven. So nothing's really trustworthy. So rather than worrying about it, just sign up for a cheap one, see if it works. If it doesn't work, get the next one. Now, typically what I would do is I would pay for one month, which is probably going to cost you $12. If it works, then you can sign up for their annual plan, which will reduce it down to like $3 a month. Now, a VPN will solve most of your country filtering problems, but it won't solve all of them. In fact, I've come across a couple things, a couple services where they're detecting VPNs, how they're doing it, I don't know. But they every time we use a VPN to access it, we get denied. So here's the next solution. Remote desktop or a remote connection tool. So here's what this is. It is a computer sitting in a physical location that your ofs connects their computer to that computer and then they're working on that computer. What a lot of people do is they use this in their office. They set up a specific computer in their office. The US Their Filipino worker is going to use remote desktop connection to connect to that computer in their office and then they're actually working on that computer. So if you have sensitive data, the data never leaves that computer. It never goes to the Philippines, it never leaves the country. They just see it, but they're seeing it on the computer in your office. Now, this will solve almost any problem that is country filtering specific because it actually puts the work coming from that computer that's in your office or that's in that country. Setting these up is super simple. You can either do it with a computer in your office. I have done it with my personal computer in the past where I let them get on. It just has to be after a certain time, like when I'm asleep, or we've done it by using like Amazon, Amazon's aws, or you can do it by using like a cloud server. So we've done it with Amazon's aws, which they let you quickly and easily set up a computer with remote desktop access to it. Your team can log into it and then you can easily shut that Down. So we pay for like one hour of access, which I don't know, costs like 15 cents or something for that hour. I don't actually know. Maybe it's like a dollar an hour, not really sure. But it's pretty easy to set that up. And there are lots of services like this that will let you set up a remote desktop on a server. So it's not yours, it's not in your office, it's in the cloud, somewhere your team can connect to it. Now, a VPN will slow down their connection slightly. It's usually pretty dang good. Like, good enough for me to still watch video. Remote desktop connection is definitely going to slow things down because it's loading the actual video of the desktop and sending that whole video all the time to the Philippines. Another advantage of the remote desktop, though, is that the work is actually being done on that computer. So if they disconnect, well, the computer is still there. Nothing has happened. The computer itself didn't disconnect. It's just that their connection to that computer changed. So all the work they were doing is still right there, still available. You could get onto that computer, or they can just log back into that computer and continue the work, no problem. Now, there is one last option that my team didn't tell me about that has since come up. It is a remote browser. So this was originally developed, I think, for browser testing, where if you're a web developer, every browser renders a website slightly different. And you want to see what it looks like on Chrome or on Safari or on Firefox, or you want to see what it looks like on Safari on iOS versus Chrome on Android. You want to see all these things. So there are websites now that will let you, from your computer, log into their browser and browse the Internet from a specific type of browser. Well, that gives you a new IP address just like a VPN does. Or it gives you a new physical location just like a remote desktop does. This one's a little bit less committing than a remote desktop. It may not be as effective as a remote desktop, but really easy to test. So if you search remote browser access, you'll find it very simple. So there are three different options to let you give your team access to services that are filtering by country. Super simple and pretty dang affordable.