Zoom enriches enterprise solutions offer

Zoom has unveiled a number of functionalities to enhance its enterprise offerings portfolio with specific features to help organisations meet their compliance, security, privacy, survivability and manageability requirements.

The company cited research showing that in 2023 alone, more than $549m in non-compliance penalties were issued globally, more than 353 million individuals were affected by security breaches, and 31% of enterprises experienced unstable network or bandwidth constraints.

As a result, it added that companies faced “urgent” pressures to manage often complex compliance obligations, avoid hefty fines, safeguard their reputations against security threats, and prevent user dissatisfaction stemming from unreliable connectivity.

Zoom was confident that its latest additions were poised to help companies overcome these challenges, with Zoom chief product officer Smita Hashim saying: “[These] offerings reflect our commitment to empowering businesses and providing them with offerings that enable them to be more efficient, secure, compliant and reliable.

“Our advanced enterprise products and features are essential tools built for Zoom Workplace and Zoom Business Services such as Zoom Events and Zoom Contact Centre that work behind the scenes as part of the network infrastructure to provide exceptional experiences to our customers. Our goal is to make communication and collaboration foolproof, future-proof and fail-proof.”

Zoom’s advanced enterprise offerings are organised across six key categories: communications compliance; data residency and privacy compliance; policy and deployment management; security and access control; analytics and insights; network optimisation and survivability.

Zoom Compliance Manager (ZCM) Plus is designed to beef up the core initial ZCM platform launched in March 2024, powered by Theta Lake, providing archiving, eDiscovery, legal hold and information protection offerings for enterprises.

Zoom Compliance Manager Plus enhances ZCM with advanced features such as risk detection, data loss protection and advanced trends analysis. These enhanced capabilities, the tech firm assured, are built to will further help organisations fulfil regulatory obligations and mitigate communications compliance risks.

Zoom Meeting Survivability has a new level of network redundancy and enables business continuity, helping to ensure uninterrupted Zoom meeting service even, it is claimed, during internet disruption due to outages from a storm, natural disaster or carrier failure.

Zoom Node, a central hub for hosting Zoom workloads on-premises, offers “assurance to keep meetings running smoothly” via a failover to datacentres where meetings are hosted on local servers with minimal disruption to the end users.

Already available for Zoom Webinars and Zoom Events, the capability of Zoom Mesh now extends to Zoom meetings for “exceptional” user experience regardless of bandwidth constraints. Zoom said companies can now optimise bandwidth usage and save up to 60% on internet bandwidth and associated costs.

Customer managed key (CMK) hybrid now enhances Zoom’s current CMK data privacy offering by providing customers with more options to manage the encryption keys used to protect data maintained by Zoom. It is said to allow customers to control the entire encryption/decryption process on-premise.

Zoom team chat messages, for example, can be encrypted locally by the Zoom Workplace app. However, as a result, some Zoom cloud-based team chat functionalities will not be available. The new features will be available for Zoom Workplace, starting with the support of Zoom team chat, in Q4 2024.

A number of Zoom advanced enterprise offerings including end-to-end encryption, GDPR and privacy controls, management dashboards, and other capabilities are already available with Zoom Workplace Enterprise licenses, while other features, including these new products, are available as paid add-ons.