New security and compliance features in team collaboration tool, Webex Teams

I hope that you’ve been keeping up with all the exciting news from Cisco Collaboration in the past few months.  We’ve had a ton of announcements about new capabilities and experiences. Like how we’re changing the way work gets done, from the Huddle space  to the biggest of boardrooms and how we’re changing the way people join meetings with the a single button to join across all of these spaces.  Most recently we showed you how our work to integrate file sharing and storage solutions has made the day-to-day lives of end-users so much better!  On the heels of that, we wanted to make sure that we also gave you a quick round-up tour of some of the new things that help administrators as well, with a deep dive on security and compliance.  Security and compliance are critical aspects of any long-lived and useful collaboration solution – admins want to rest assured that their users are doing the right things in the right places with the right people.  So let’s take a quick peek at some of the new capabilities we’ve released in just these past 2 months that further our promises to you, our customers: 

Securing your Uninterrupted Workstream  

In addition to Webex Teams native file sharing and storage, Cisco Webex Control Hub now allows IT administrators the flexibility to enable Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint Online as an integration with Webex Teams. With this, users can share and co-edit the latest OneDrive and SharePoint Online files right within their Webex Teams work spaces. 

Setup requires just a single toggle in Webex Control Hub.   And no changes are needed to your existing file sharing permissions and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies. IT administrators also have full control over which Office 365/Azure AD Tenant they want to enable. This ensures that only IT approved domains are available, and users cannot use personal OneDrive or SharePoint Online documents. This not only eliminates Data Loss risk but also protects against Malware threats.  And for the highest level of control, IT administrators can even turn off native file storage in Webex Teams so that all content is routed through their existing enterprise file storage service.   

Cisco Webex Control Hub Admin controls allow you to: 

• Enable Webex Teams native file storage or Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint Online, or both  
• Block personal or shadow IT OneDrive or SharePoint Online folders, and only permit approved instances 
• Enable or disable the entitlement to a subset of users or for your entire organization   

Get more information on file storage and sharing Admin Control [link]. 

Compliance gets easier with Legal Hold  

In order to help you with data retention requirements to support legal investigations, we now support also support “Legal Hold”. This makes it easy for your organization to preserve any Webex Teams content related to litigation or investigation, all without impacting end user experience. During a litigation proceeding, you may be required to preserve data for a period that may be longer than your retention policy.  In this case you can use legal hold to ensure that relevant information is not purged, but instead but retained until the litigation or investigation is completed. 

Get more information on Legal Hold [link]. 

Better visibility with Admin Audit Logs 

Today you can monitor and manage what your end-users do via our Events API, or through some of the powerful DLP and CASB products that integrate with Webex Teams such as Smarsh or Symantec.  But equally important is managing administrator actions.  Whether it be to prevent accidental changes, carry out root cause analysis or prevent malicious actions.  For example, you may want to see:  

• Which admin made a change to an org setting? 
• Who deleted the CIO’s device? 
• Who recently updated Jane’s profile to be an org admin?   

The admin audit log provides the data you need for this type of investigation, and even archiving purposes. You can now view significant change actions, such as changes to your organization’s settings.  Admin audit logs can be viewed in Control Hub where you can search for actions that have taken place within a specific date range, or for specific actions, or view the actions of a specific administrator. You can also download the logs to a comma separated values (CSV) file.  And, to make things easier, we’re working on providing an API so that you can tie this information into your other management experiences. 

For more information on the admin audit log feature, see [link]. 

We keep growing the compliance ecosystem 

We know that it’s expensive to get started and set up with security and compliance tools, so we want you to be able to keep using the services and apps you already use.  To further this promise, we’re excited to announce that we’ve recently finished our integration with Palo Alto Networks to enable admins to use this app too to monitor and manage their Webex experiences!   And ICYMI, Cisco Cloudlock works with Webex too!   

Last but certainly not least, do register for our joint webinar with Smarsh [link here], one of our oldest and dearest partners in the Compliance space!  Mike Pagani, Senior Director of Product Marketing from Smarsh, and Niraj Gopal, Director of Product for Cisco Webex Security & Compliance offerings will be talking about how Webex and Smarsh make for a better together story for our customers in heavily regulated environments!