Every organization needs to foster communication and collaboration between its employees, while at the same time maintaining a level of security that protects the company’s most valuable assets. What communication methods are necessary for the success of your enterprise—and how can you best secure those processes?
Why Secure Communication is Important to the Enterprise
A successful business depends on effective and efficient communication between its employees. This is even more vital today with a significant increase in remote workers. As offices become more virtual, employees need to collaborate with each other in real-time, no matter where they’re located.
Unfortunately, communicating with co-workers is a significant issue among remote workers. In fact, a recent study showed that communication and collaboration are the biggest struggles that remote workers face, with 20% of respondents indicating this as a top concern.
As more workers performed their duties from home, security also became an issue. 20% of companies said they had experienced a security breach due to remote workers.
Five Essential Types of Secure Enterprise Communication
What your organization and your employees need, then, are communication methods that both enhance productivity and maintain security. There are five primary methods that meet these criteria: video conferencing, voice calls, individual messaging, group messaging, and file sharing.
1. Video Conferencing
Video conferencing has been a boon to remote workers during the COVID-19 crisis. With in-person meetings no longer feasible, companies have turned to video conferencing to enable their employees to collaborate face-to-face.
Thanks to video conferencing, teams can now meet virtually even if their members are located in multiple locations. Employees working from home can join meetings from their living rooms or home offices and maintain necessary relationships with co-workers, vendors, and customers. Video conferencing software also enables collaboration tools such as breakout rooms, whiteboards, and screen sharing.
While many video conferencing solutions have shown to pose a security risk, those that feature full end-to-end encryption protect your video conferences. With all video communications properly encrypted, employees can meet with the assurance that unauthorized users cannot intercept their discussions.
2. Voice Calls
Voice calls, while an older technology, are every bit as important as video calls and conferences. Many questions can be answered by a simple voice call, without the need to set up a video conference. The telephone remains an important tool for the enterprise.
Standard landline or cellular calls, however, carry significant security risks. Third parties can tap into your calls, thus intercepting any private or confidential conversations in which you may engage. It’s actually one of the least secure communication methods.
Voice calling carries less risk when it’s included as part of a comprehensive, secure communications platform. Voice calls can be secured with the same type of end-to-end encryption that protects video calls on the platform. This way, a voice call can have the same security as a face-to-face conversation.
3. Individual Text Messaging
Direct messaging is another useful and potentially secure communication method. Not every communication has to include a verbal component; many times, a simple one-sentence text will do. Chatting one-on-one is a quick and easy way to communicate with team members directly while going through your workday.
That said, not all text messaging platforms are secure. Consumer-oriented messaging apps, in particular, can be easily breached by dedicated hackers.
What’s key is to make sure that you have a solution that is easy for your employees to use and yet also provides complete security. Look for end-to-end encryption, ephemerality, and a zero trust architecture to ensure that the platform you are using is protecting your individual text messages.
4. Group Messaging
In many organizations, email is the preferred method of communication, capable of conveying complex information to large numbers of individuals with the press of the send button.
Unfortunately, email has a history of security issues. From spam to phishing to email servers being breached by malicious actors, email has long been the bane of enterprise security departments.
Using a secure group messaging platform can help you communicate information to large groups of people while avoiding any social engineering attacks that are inherent in email use. Look for a group messaging platform that can verify users’ identity and warns you if someone is out of your network.
5. File Sharing
Finally, employees need to access important files in real-time, even if they’re working remotely. Whether it’s a small word processing document or a large video file, your employees need a way to share and store files. End-to-end encryption is key here, as you want to make sure that the file is encrypted the entire time it travels to its recipient, rather than being decrypted at the server.
Choose Wickr for Your Secure Communication Needs
Wickr is a secure communications platform that offers all of the communication and collaboration methods your employees need—video conferencing, voice calling, individual and group messaging, file sharing, and more. All communications are secured by 256-bit end-to-end encryption, which makes the platform ideal for companies with a significant remote workforce.
Contact us today to learn more about Wickr’s secure communication methods!