OnePassport knows that when people trust you with their personal information, data security matters more than anything.

COVID resulted in many headaches, but one less talked about is the avalanche of administration brought down on small business. The paperwork and monitoring involved in ensuring the ever-changing compliance of your workforce can bury even the most diligent business owner.

As a result, being COVID-compliant introduced a whole new stream of clients to risk-management platform OnePassport.

“Offices want to open up again, but they must be showing that they’re taking all reasonable steps to keep their staff safe,” says CEO and co-founder Michael Maher.

OnePassport is an encrypted cloud-based system that ensures organisations meet all necessary workforce requirements, including privacy, security and compliance obligations such as COVID mandatories.

The story behind OnePassport

The company was founded by Maher and co-founder Sean Bennett in 2017 off the back of Maher’s aged-care workforce advisory business. In 2015 Maher had become frustrated with the lack of continuity offered in the aged-care sector where he worked as a consultant. Every aged-care facility was independently trying to manage workforce compliance and training requirements for each worker – even though the industry standard that the majority of workers work for more than one employer.

“It seemed crazy,” says Maher. By creating a system that recorded all necessary information in one central place, compliance became easy as each worker could share their info with any employer via OnePassport.

Other sectors with the same compliance issues soon came calling and from that OnePassport was established as its own entity. They’re growing rapidly and are now a team of 13 working collaboratively from Melbourne, Brisbane, Ballarat, and the Philippines.

“We have people working from home and on the road as well as in offices in Melbourne and the Philippines,” Maher explains. “So we need a lot of flexibility.”

Making data security a priority

Another important aspect of remote working for the OnePassport team is data security.

“We deal in an industry that’s known as PII – personally identifiable information,” explains Maher. “People trust us to hold this really key data to make their life easier. I’m a nurse, I just want to get on with nursing, but I do that at three hospitals, can you help me? I’m a doctor, I’m an aged-care worker, I’m a builder; so they trust us with their information.”

As a result, the security and privacy aspects of holding thousands of Australian workers’ data are, as Maher puts it, “through the roof”.

To ensure the necessary security, OnePassport uses Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure combined with Microsoft Defender.

As well as offering top-shelf security to their clients, their own hybrid team works exclusively through these platforms to ensure OnePassport’s compliance with the privacy and security mandatories of their own work.

The commitment to security is something Windows business users like OnePassport value highly in their operating systems. It’s something that’s been taken into account with the latest Windows 11 PCs, which protect hardware at the core with TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 technologies, silicon-assisted security, and data and identity protection.

Features like Windows Defender System Guard also help to protect and maintain the integrity of the system as it starts up, and maintain that integrity both locally and remotely.

Scalability is key for this startup with big plans

The comprehensiveness of the security offered combined with the scalability of the products were both equally important to this growing startup.

“As a startup, especially when scaling, we need to be able to access things that we can understand and we don’t need to have our own IT department managing it. It’s got to be easy to use and designed for people like us,” explains Maher.

The company has recently started a move into New Zealand and the UK, and have been approached by hospitals in places like Vietnam and Taiwan who want to do credentialing of clinical staff better. So growth is very much on Maher’s mind and he’s open about where he wants to take OnePassport.

“We were approached prior to COVID by the World Health Organisation about their immunisation program in developing nations… their current system usually means that the Department of Health in the capital has got no idea how many people have been vaccinated by NGOs working around the country. We can change that,” he adds.

“The big driver for us on top of the commercial side is being able to change the world.”

Find out more about about OnePassport here.

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This article is brought to you by Startup Daily in partnership with Microsoft.

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