The way we work together has changed to something unrecognizable over the last few years. We work on whatever device is on hand, from wherever we are, and we share a lot of content as well as sensitive information with our teams. This free exchange of information has sped up business processes, greatly improving team collaboration and unleashing the creativity needed to help innovation move at an unprecedented pace. But this new freedom has also brought with it rising concerns around security. Can we be sure our content and data are secure as we collaborate virtually across internal and external teams and devices?

Security concerns in team collaboration

As we have seen with many high-profile public breaches of security, the costs can be enormous and have become a pressing concern for businesses – reputations and revenue are on the line. Open Collaboration means users want innovative team collaboration tools with a great experience. They demand easy-to-use, pervasive, advanced collaboration capabilities. Company and customer confidential information must be available and easy to share, but at the same time, IT needs to ensure its security as defined by their corporate IT policies and intentions. Bottom line, corporate data needs to be protected fully. Messages, conversations, screen sharing, content, in fact any information about the company, customers, and users must be protected and accessible and viewable only by authorized users at all times. This gives IT and security teams a headache. Not least because up to 50% of devices we now use are invisible to IT. What’s needed is a 360-degree approach to security and compliance in team collaboration.

The promise of security in Webex

You can rest-easy knowing Cisco Webex has your back. Security is central to everything we do. Namely, how to balance the requirements of users with those of IT, security, and compliance professionals. In simple terms we give users what they need to collaborate openly and freely whilst enabling IT to retain control, security, and the ability to protect their business and customers.

Balancing risks and rewards to satisfy both IT and end users can be tricky. The good news is that you can do both – be secure while your teams collaborate freely and without any compromise. In fact, this is what we have enabled for many customers. Don’t just take my word for it, hear from Andy Jurczyk, the CIO at Seyfarth Shaw, on how his successful law firm has maintained the upmost security and also saved “tens of millions while improving company culture.”

Seyfarth Shaw improves team collaboration, securely

Seyfarth Shaw LLP has a highly dispersed and mobile workforce travelling to their clients, to courts, and between their offices. They were struggling with multiple point solutions for conference calling, webinars, screen sharing, and click-to-dial capabilities. Andy recognized that their employees had significant challenges with different tool interfaces and struggled to make it all work for both IT and their users. After some careful consideration they went “all in” with Cisco and now feel that they have an inclusive and intuitive team collaboration solution for all ages, skill-levels, and locations. What’s more, it has had a profound impact on how they work globally and how their teams collaborate 24/7 across time zones and borders, especially when working on a big deal.

This has led to a savings of tens of millions of dollars by reducing their office space by one-third and adopting telecommuting as a work-style for some staff. It has also had a massive impact with staff retention, with some employees turning down job offers with higher pay, but less flexibility.

With that said, one of the biggest benefits for them has been around security. They serve clients in highly regulated industries and regions, such as the financial services, healthcare, and those located in the European Union – and because they are backed by Cisco, they feel that they can easily meet client requirements around architecture, privacy, encryption.

“From a security compliance perspective, we pretty much get audited by anything you can imagine. There’s so many cloud services I can’t use as a law firm because of the restrictions I have for compliance. But we can use Webex for everything.”

Andy Jurczyk, CIO, Seyfarth Shaw

One of the reasons they chose Webex Teams over other team collaboration tools was for the security it provides. In particular, our unique approach to security and the ability to own and manage the encryption keys for the environment that they needed.

“We maintain a private cloud, multiple data centers for redundancy, our own encryption, and security, and everything associated with protecting our clients’ data. But those audits typically prevent us from putting any of our clients’ data anywhere in the cloud. However, Webex Teams and Cisco’s new encryption capability will actually allow me to put client data in the cloud while satisfying the audits. This is revolutionary for heavily-compliant industries like ours.”

In fact Webex Teams now enables their client teams (often up to 30 people) to collaborate and communicate more effectively, and securely. All this leads to a strong team, strong buy-in and strong culture for Seyfarth Shaw LLP.

Learn more about Webex Teams collaboration and try it for free here.