Secure and Compliant Collaboration with Webex Teams

Easy, Secure Collaboration

In today’s modern and digital workplaces, teamwork transcends organizational and functional boundaries. Effective, secure, and compliant collaboration with your stakeholders, partners and customers is paramount to improving productivity.

Compliance, administration security controls and policies vary greatly across organizations and industry verticals. For any modern collaboration platform, it’s critical to have the flexibility to facilitate communications with external participants outside of the user’s organization – coupled with security controls that minimize friction for users. Webex Teams has a rich set of features spanning compliance, administrative controls and visibility – giving you a secure collaboration experience.

Webex Teams is the easiest messaging platform to set up for cross company collaboration

By default, Webex Teams is an open platform allowing users to communicate with others both inside and outside the organization – while still maintaining end to end encryption and control.

Compliance

Organizations need to comply with internal and external rules and regulations. Companies in regulated industries have to meet regulatory mandates in addition to their own compliance and data loss prevention policies. Cisco Webex Teams allows organizations to ensure compliance around data loss prevention through integration with leading CASB solutions like Cisco Cloudlock. These integrations allow visibility into all user generated content with immediate detection and remediation of user actions and posts that violate your compliance policies.

In addition, Cisco Webex Teams also supports “legal hold” to help organizations with data retention requirements to support legal investigations for compliance. During a litigation proceeding, organizations may be required to preserve data for a period that may be longer than their normal retention policy. In this case, legal hold can be enabled to ensure that relevant information is not purged, but instead retained until the litigation or investigation is complete.

Control

Under certain circumstances and regulatory environments, it may be necessary to block communication with external users who belong to a different organization. Administrators can enforce this policy and block external communications easily with native controls built in Webex Teams. When configured appropriately, users in the organization will no longer be able to message users outside their organization. We are enhancing this capability to allow limited communication to users only in approved domains via a Whitelist created and maintained by admins.

Visibility

Communications with users outside an Organization represents a fairly significant surface area of risk and exposure. With some messaging solutions, administrators and compliance teams have no visibility when users communicate with people outside their organization. Webex Teams enables users from multiple companies to create cross-company channels and allows administrators or compliance officers from both companies to have visibility into all communications generated by users who belong to their respective organizations.

The built in ediscovery search tool provides Compliance officers the ability to search and extract content generated by specific custodians (users) across a time range of interest.

Additionally, many enterprises have invested in enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. Webex Teams allows integration with ECM solutions, such as Microsoft OneDrive and Sharepoint Online, and ensures that only files permitted by the ECM solution can be shared via Webex Teams. Access control policies and permissions configured in the content management system extend to users of Webex Teams in a seamless fashion without the need for any replication.

The setup has zero deployment cost, requiring just a simple toggle in Webex Control Hub. Additionally, it requires no change to an organization’s existing data loss prevention (DLP) policies, or the need to buy additional licenses. Moreover, Webex Teams also provides IT administrators with full control, so they can decide which SharePoint Online and OneDrive domains or Office 365 Tenant they want to use. This means that only IT-approved domains are available to users, thus minimizing the risk of data leakage while providing greater protection against malware threats.

Webex Teams also allows IT managers to disable storage of user documents in the Webex cloud without impacting user workflows. All user files are stored only in IT’s selected file storage system- including file previews. Content Management settings are very easy to configure as shown below.

Learn more and Get Webex Teams

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Learn More on how Cisco Collaboration keeps your data safe with our unique end-to-end encryption:

• Attackers target organizations where they are weakest. Today, that often means the cloud. Watch a Cloud Hack
• Focusing on Security In An Open Collaboration World
• Why Collaboration IT Administrators Trust Webex
• Cisco Webex – Building and Maintaining Trust with Collaboration Administrators

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Contributor:Raj Kumar, Product Manager, Webex Enterprise Security and Compliance 

Raj is Product Manager for Webex Enterprise Security and Compliance and focuses on enterprise content management, end-to-end encryption of customer content, and compliance.
Raj’s background is in enterprise grade cloud services and applications – having worked at Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle. He holds Master’s degree in Computer Science & Engineering from University of Florida and Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT).

 

Contributor: Ramesh Bodapati, Senior Manager, Product Management

Ramesh Bodapati is focused on product management for Cisco Webex Control Hub.
Ramesh has an extensive background including hardware design, firmware design, software design and product management across a wide range of solutions; including utility computing where he specialized on measuring actual usage to trigger the appropriate bill (based on utilization). Ramesh got his BS in EECS from UC Berkeley and MS from Stanford.