Beyond the noise — 7 reasons it’s safe to run Zoom

Prior to joining Five9, I spent 6 years at Cisco as SVP & GM of the collaboration business (including Webex). Before that I was the President of one of the largest cybersecurity companies and spent 20 years building security software to protect folks from the bad guys.

While at Cisco I brought my passion for security to the table and we made numerous security improvements to Webex while making it easier to use. Since I’ve left, the team continues to make Webex easier and more secure.

I never anticipated the usage of these business technologies coming into the home, but that’s what they’ve done, most notably with Zoom. Over the last several weeks, my kids have switched to distance learning. Like many others, our school tried a popular meeting product first and found it wasn’t up to the task — and within days they’d switched to Zoom. With my kids in daily Zoom meetings it was with annoyance and personal concern that I read the headlines of sick individuals “Zoom bombing” unsuspecting users, schools and so on.

My personal concerns mirrored that of many others. At a time when the industry was serving great global need, could we count on the security bonafides of Zoom to be the most depended upon platform? Should I allow Five9’s business to continue relying on Zoom?

Zoom provided me unfettered access to their engineers and security experts to answer all my questions. Through these conversations, I was able to get insight into some of the most important security capabilities which have been challenges for other meetings products.

After spending time with them, it is my opinion that Zoom has set the bar for the entire industry creating a product that is not only at least as secure as the competition, but also implements those security capabilities in a way that doesn’t sacrifice usability and ease of use.

I’ve summarized the top 7 facts about Zoom security that I found to back up this claim:

1. Zoom has a highly secure Personal Meeting ID (aka PMI) solution. The Personal Meeting ID has become an incredibly popular way to meet (35% of all meetings are taking place on PMI’s), especially in the WFH era where ad-hoc meetings are common. Zoom has an industry-leading capability here with full password…