Microsoft Teams

Managing Security, Data Governance And Users’ Privacy in Meetings

  • By The Cloud Factory
  • April 28, 2022

As the pandemic has accelerated the shift of many in-person activities to online, video meetings have become commonplace. Organizations therefore need to think of ways and tools that help their workers collaborate and stay connected with ease. However, this also increased the need for tighter monitoring of potential security and privacy issues and data governance.

Let’s understand the key concerns in video meetings:


1. End-to-end encryption

End-to-end encryption means no one can access the video chats, including the company making the video meeting tool. For example, Microsoft Teams users can enable end-to-end encryption for 1:1 Teams calls. However, users may not be able to take advantage of some of the features in this case, like live captioning, recording, call merge etc.

Microsoft Teams automatically encrypts all communication using Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Real-Time Transport Protocol (SRTP) protocols offer high-level of security.



2. Robust meeting control

A good video meeting platform empowers a meeting administrator with more control over a meeting room's settings and policies, setting participants' privileges, removing disruptive attendees, and blocking anonymous guests.

For meetings sessions, only authorized users should join the session. It must offer domain-based security to limit access to confidential information.



3. Safeguarding Privacy

Users’ privacy has not merely remained an afterthought, it’s an essential component required for the success of hybrid work culture.

For example, when recording a meeting, participants are notified when recording starts and participants receive a privacy notice directly. And when the recordings are over, only people invited in the meeting can access it.

  • Your identity and account information are fully protected.
  • The data is deleted after the termination of subscription.
  • Your personal data is not used to serve ads.
  • The data-in-transit is fully encrypted.


4. Data governance and compliance

What do you mean by governance? It’s about managing the users’ access data in compliance with your business standards in order to ensure data security.

Put simply, it ensures the policies you set to establish compliance to ensure compliance with the rules and regulations of your organization. It clearly demarcates where your boundaries are.

Teams have a wealth of information about compliance with regulations such as permission policies, retention policies, data loss prevention (DLP), eDiscovery and legal holds for channels, chats and files, audit log search, etc. You can protect sensitive information and confidential resources in your organization by configuring sensitivity label policies. Also, it allows safeguarding against malicious software hidden in files with Microsoft Defender for Office 365.


Final words

The core principles of any secure real-time meetings tool or application are—how well it controls data, where data is located& how it’s being used, how secure is your data in transit and how you defend this data from malicious attacks. Microsoft Teams passes on these four parameters with flying colors, allowing the users to collaborate securely with confidence.

Want to build a highly secure hybrid workplace?
Reach out to us at hello@tcf.cloud and we will be happy to assist you.