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by Aware
As a video conferencing and instant messaging platform, Zoom supports business operations with virtual conference rooms and asynchronous collaboration tools that became a dominant form of communication during the transition to remote work during the pandemic. Between 2020 and 2021, Zoom’s revenue grew more than 300% as companies adopted the platform to keep their businesses operating as smoothly as possible.
With such rapid adoption rates, many organizations are just now looking at how well Zoom meets compliance and regulatory requirements within their industries. Can Zoom be monitored for compliance and security purposes? In this article, we’ll look at Zoom’s security monitoring capabilities and whether or not there are gaps that should be addressed.
Contents
- What is Zoom monitoring?
- Why is Zoom monitoring important?
- Does Zoom have in-built monitoring features?
- Are Zoom’s monitoring features sufficient?
- Integrate Zoom with Aware for data security monitoring and more
What is Zoom monitoring?
Zoom’s most popular features involve video calls and screen sharing, but the app also supports real-time messaging using Zoom Team Chat. Zoom users can hold private conversations, collaborate with groups, and set up channels devoted to specific topics or projects.
Monitoring in Zoom refers to capturing and archiving communications from the Zoom platform to ensure regulatory compliance and security. For Zoom content to be fully captured, organizations need a way to keep records of these types of communications:
- Zoom video and audio recordings of online meetings and Zoom webinars
- Text-based chat messages
- Whiteboard content and file sharing
- Voice calls through the Zoom phone system
Storing these records in a tamper-proof repository that’s fully indexed and searchable ensures transparency for compliance regulations and eDiscovery purposes.
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Why is Zoom monitoring important?
Monitoring Zoom content helps mitigate risks to the organization from insider threats, compliance breakdowns, and disruptions to business continuity. These monitoring practices safeguard sensitive data and give companies insights into how Zoom is being used to improve workflows and ensure proper procedures for compliance and security.
Assess call usage and quality
Companies can track metrics like Zoom call volume, duration, and participation count to understand how teams within the organization are utilizing the platform and adhering to processes. They can also assess audio/video call quality, latency, and packet loss, which helps IT support teams identify concerns that negatively impact customer experience.
Proactively identify and troubleshoot issues
Monitoring Zoom allows organizations to proactively detect and troubleshoot issues before they disrupt critical functions and team collaborations. Understanding where problems originate can help IT take prompt action and reduce downtime on the platform to keep business flowing smoothly.
Analyze insights to improve Zoom deployment and usage
Monitoring Zoom data for usage patterns and Zoom performance bottlenecks allows organizations to optimize their Zoom deployment and allocate resources more efficiently.
Compliance adherence and data security
For highly regulated industries and organizations handling sensitive information, Zoom monitoring is critical. Organizations can ensure they’re compliant with various regulatory agencies, like FINRA, the SEC, FCA, PCI SCC, and others that mandate the supervision of business communications.
Protect against insider threats
Zoom monitoring enables companies to detect and prevent insider threat incidents, like unauthorized data sharing, confidential information leaks, or other malicious or negligent activities that may occur during meetings or file transfers.
Prevent data loss
Many Zoom monitoring solutions can help organizations capture meeting recordings, chat logs, and shared files, ensuring important data is retained and retrievable for data loss prevention, compliance, or legal purposes.
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Does Zoom have in-built monitoring features?
Zoom comes with built-in monitoring features, but they are limited in scope and functionality. They provide basic insights into usage and network performance metrics, but many organizations may require more comprehensive compliance monitoring and troubleshooting, especially for larger enterprises or complex environments.
To access Zoom’s monitoring features:
- Log in to Zoom’s web portal as an administrator.
- Go to the “Reports” section.
- Select the report type (e.g., Usage, Meeting, etc.).
Here are some of the metrics the reports will contain:
Device usage
View the number of active end users, devices, and operating systems joining Zoom meetings. From this, you may be able to identify potential compatibility issues or problems specific to devices.
Meeting uptime
Meeting durations, start and end times and disruptions or failures are found in the meeting uptime metric. You can determine patterns and recurring issues with meeting stability here.
Bandwidth usage
Monitor bandwidth consumption for your Zoom meetings, which is useful for optimizing network connections and resources and identifying bottlenecks.
Meeting types
Zoom can break down the types of meetings by video conference, audio only, screen sharing, etc., which can give admins resource allocation and pattern usage information that’s useful for compliance monitoring.
Participant engagement
There are limited participant engagement metrics, like attendance tracking, chat activity, and poll responses. These features may not provide detailed insights into individual behaviors, but they can be useful for overall meeting engagement levels.
Because these metrics offer only the highest level of insight into meeting behaviors and tracking, many enterprises opt for third-party integrations that provide more advanced monitoring capabilities such as real-time performance monitoring, detailed analytics, and proactive alerts.
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Are Zoom’s monitoring features sufficient?
Entities with more stringent compliance and security requirements may find that Zoom’s native monitoring features fall short in several ways.
Not enough detail to measure compliance
Zoom’s native monitoring features focus primarily on performance issues and basic usage metrics. There’s little depth and granularity available to monitor or enforce company-specific policies or industry-specific compliance. Regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, or government often have strict requirements for record-keeping, communication supervision, and data privacy. Zoom’s built-in tools fall short of addressing those needs.
Logging in from any device complicates monitoring
One of the Zoom app’s best features is how easy it is for users to join meetings from anywhere on any device. However, such flexibility can be a challenge from a compliance monitoring and access control perspective. The native monitoring features don’t provide sufficient visibility into the identity of participants joining meetings and their device types or allow any type of role-based access controls over meeting participants.
Zoom’s app integrations can mean a poor user experience
The versatility of Zoom’s third-party app integrations and services that enable organizations to enhance their collaborations and productivity workflows is another well-touted feature of the platform. However, it can also introduce complexity into the performance that Zoom’s built-in monitoring tools aren’t capable of capturing or troubleshooting. The result may be degraded UX with no visibility of the root cause or bottleneck.
To resolve these limitations, many enterprises integrate with third-party solutions that provide more comprehensive monitoring, compliance, and governance capabilities than are possible with Zoom’s native features. These specialized solutions can provide deeper insights and ensure compliance with industry regulations while helping organizations maintain high-quality user experiences with Zoom’s versatility.
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Integrate Zoom with Aware for data security monitoring and more
With Aware’s collaboration intelligence platform integrated with Zoom Team Chat, organizations can flag data security risks in real time and ensure compliance adherence. Administrators can safeguard sensitive data and leverage Aware’s sophisticated monitoring features to enhance Zoom’s native available metrics and more closely manage their organization’s available data.
With Aware, companies can:
- Easily identify communications containing PII, PCI, and other sensitive data.
- Create granular retention policies.
- Ensure regulatory compliance.
- Build an immutable archive that is searchable.
- Automate policy enforcement.
- Have complete data control with audit logs, data encryption, and role-based access controls (RBAC).
When concerning behavior surfaced on a large European beverage company’s collaboration tool, they were concerned with GDPR compliance, internal acceptable use policies, and IP loss. To complicate matters, multiple languages created barriers to communication. With Aware, the company was able to surface where trade secrets and PII were shared and implement data management tools to address the problem. Rules were implemented to enforce internal policies, and the company reduced sensitive data sharing to “almost zero” while simultaneously stopping behavioral concerns, which led to safer and happier employees, compliance adherence, and secure data.
Learn how Aware can help you with compliance monitoring for Zoom Team Chat. Request a demo today!
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