How Secure are Online Meetings
Online Meetings – How Secure are they?
In order for a business to run smoothly, collaboration is necessary. Without collaboration, the right hand will not know what the left hand is doing, the probabilities of people doing the same thing but differently (at times fundamentally opposed) is very high. In order to ensure collaboration, meetings are called regularly. It does not matter if you are running a one-man operation or work in a conglomerate, meetings with suppliers, colleagues, subordinates, and/or superiors are needed.
Traditionally, meetings are held face-to-face. This has worked over the years largely because there were no viable alternatives before. Now there is: Online Meetings. Thanks to the flexibility of Internet Protocol, availability of large capacities of IP backbone and the growing sophistication of online meeting software, all one needs is a computer and access to the Internet to conduct an online meeting. This medium of collaboration has several advantages over the traditional face-to-face meeting. It is more cost-effective, has features that emulate a traditional meeting’s collaborative activities, allows for stricter moderation, and has cost-effective recording features for future playback and broadcast.
The nagging question for online meeting is, “Is it secure?” This is the biggest fear of a would-be online meeting user. Because it is run over the Internet, there is a major hesitation that is understandable, especially for meetings requiring a high level of confidentiality. There is that fear that eavesdropping into sensitive meeting proceedings, either by competition, hackers, and even the government, is easy to do when the meeting is conducted online.
Experts, however, say that this fear is largely unfounded. They argue that it is easier to breach security in a face-to-face meeting that it is for the online variety. Consider the following:
- SSL Features
As a standard feature of all major online meeting software, all session content are encrypted via Secure Socket Layer (SSL) to deliver the high level of security required for enterprise data communications. In layman’s terms, the session content are transformed into “garbage” through a sophisticated encryption process that can be understood only by software that uses a unique code key to retransform the garbage into user understandable information. This means that while the information is being transported from one point to the other, no one actually can understand it.
If someone pirates the content in transit, it will be useless unless the pirate has the code key to decrypt it. Normally, also, the storage algorithm is such that there is not one single regular place that the content is stored in. This makes it even more difficult for a thief to steal the data because he would not know where to look in the first place.
- Moderator control
Online meeting software puts full control of the session with the “owner” or moderator of the meeting. Only the moderator can invite participants to a meeting, and only those participants invited can get into the meeting.
The moderator is a powerful person in the sense that nothing happens in an online meeting that he does not allow. He can bar participants from meetings, i.e., that participant will not know anything that is happening, either in part or the entirety of the meeting. He is also the only one who has access to any records of the meeting, and it is in his PC where the decryption code key resides.
The reality of software is that as long as human beings design them, there is no 100% guarantee of security. This fact is true even with online meeting software. However, just because these software types are not 100% impregnable does not mean that they are easy to penetrate. |