Secure Your On-line Meetings!

by Mike Fasciani – Sr. Research Director | April 13, 2020 

 

The outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is causing people to be isolated from family, friends, and business associates.  This situation has caused a dramatic increase in the adoption of video meeting services for many different purposes in people’s business and personal lives.  In past times, the personal use of video was primarily done with video chat services like Skype or Facetime.  The enterprise use of video was mainly accomplished with more formal, feature-rich, and often times complex video conference services.  The pandemic is causing most of us to work and be educated from home as well as attend virtual family and social events.  As a result, educators and consumers are turning to a higher scale, more robust enterprise-grade video meeting solutions to solve for these various use cases. These novice users are learning that some application controls are needed to better assure secure online meetings.

 

The Situation with Zoom’s Privacy and Security Vulnerabilities

The adoption of enterprise video solutions for personal and K-12 educational use has led to unintended consequences for one enterprise-grade video meeting vendor in particular: Zoom.  …  The next few weeks of progress on these issues are critical for Zoom to gain back the trust of its enterprise customers.

 

Best Practices for Securing Online Meetings

Security has always been one of the many considerations when buying an enterprise-grade video meeting solution.  The recent exposure of privacy and security vulnerabilities has amplified security awareness within all organizations.  Service providers in the enterprise video solutions market are responsible for the systemic level security of its platform and network and the data it collects from its customers.  IT leaders and security officers have an equally important role in ensuring the use of these services meet corporate security policies. 

 

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IT Administrator Controls

The core layer within the organizational control is the IT Administrator layer. The IT Administrator can apply universal settings for all online meetings hosted within their organization. 

Meeting Host Controls

The meeting host needs to manage the next layer of security.  This layer gives the meeting host additional controls when the online meeting is being scheduled and during live meeting sessions

Meeting Attendee Responsibilities

The meeting attendees control the final security layer.  This layer typically witnesses the highest number of security vulnerabilities.   Meeting attendees do not realize that their choices can have a large impact on whether the meeting experience adheres to corporate security policies. 

Hosting and joining meetings will be a bit more challenging for your organization with these security settings in place.  However, it will allow meetings to take place with a greater assurance of avoiding fraudulent access by unwanted parties.  If these controls bring too much complexity to the join and hosting processes, then choose the subset of recommendations that best meet your organizations desired experiences and security practices.

 

** Contact Susan Buytenhuys, Gartner State of CA - Managing Client Director – 916.281.5145 - Susan.Buytenhuys@gartner.com