Over the last year and a half, the pandemic has brought about enormous change in the world of video conferencing. Virtual business meetings are now overwhelmingly being taken from private residences, with employees using business and personal devices to attend. To keep confidential meetings secure in the new remote workplace, it’s important that companies have standardized best practices in place.

In May 2021, Vivo talked with Rod Schultz, the head of product security and privacy at Zoom, about strategies and tools available to secure video conferences. Things like Zoom’s green shield logo provides meeting hosts with insights on the security of their meetings, including the data center(s) in which the meeting is being hosted.

Watch Vivo's Roundtable discussion on video conferencing security

Whether your organization is using Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, or another meeting platform, there are sets of security best practices that should be followed.

One of the simplest ways to protect video meetings is to require a meeting’s host and its participants to verify their user credentials in order to start and/or access a meeting. This ensures that even if a meeting link is shared publicly, only attendees invited by the host can join. The host can also enable the waiting room feature to control who is admitted to meetings and when.

In addition to attendee authentication and authorization, implementing strong passcodes is key to protecting video meetings. Administrators have access to settings that require meeting hosts and attendees to abide by certain best practices.

In June 2021, Microsoft published recommendations for ensuring strong passwords, which included requiring a minimum password length of 8 characters (but not much longer), not requiring special characters, and not instituting periodic password resets, which increase the odds that users will use easily guessed passwords in an attempt to meet password requirements in a way they’ll remember.

Banning common passwords like “password” and “absdefgh” and educating users on not reusing work passwords in personal settings will also improve the security of your company and meetings.

Virtual backgrounds quickly transitioned from a fun feature to a privacy necessity during the pandemic. In order to continue to protect and respect the privacy of individual employees, organizations should encourage employees to use virtual backgrounds in order to create a better layer of separation between work and home.

To learn more about how Zoom helps you protect your meetings, you can read their Security Overview.

Video conferencing hardware providers like Poly have also put together documentation to help users understand the role your hardware plays in ensuring security and privacy for its users. To learn more, visit Poly Security and Privacy White Papers.