Securing Employee and Customer Engagement in the Age of Digital Communications

Author: Irwin Lazar, President & Principal Analyst

Organizations today have more ways of communicating internally and externally than ever before: Almost 68% now use team collaboration apps internally and with business partners and customers. Nearly 43% of companies use consumer mobile business chat services such as Apple Business Chat, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, WhatsApp, and more.

As the number of interaction channels grows, so too does the need for a proactive, comprehensive management strategy to protect organizations from an increasing array of threats. Message services must meet requirements for governance and compliance, and must be protected against fraud that puts both company and customers data at risk.

The key to success is adoption of a unified security platform that provides end-to-end visibility and consistent policy enforcement across all potential communications channels. Therefore, security and IT leaders should:

• Create a proactive security strategy covering all forms of human-to-human communications; internal, business-to-business, and customer-facing
• As part of the strategy development, understand risks of various potential attacks including hackers, inadvertent sharing of sensitive data, and reputational risk from inappropriate content or conversations
• Assess the ability of third-party specialty tools to both provide end-to-end visibility and management across all communications channels, to also minimize administrative costs by automating threat monitoring and mitigation
• Expect rapid changes in communications channels and risk as methods of engagement continue to expand

Table of Contents

• Executive Summary
• The State of Enterprise Communications
• The Evolution of Team Collaboration
• Beyond Team Collaboration: The State of Customer Messaging
• The Security Imperative of Securing Human-to-Human Communications
• The State of Communications Security
• Conclusions and Recommendations

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