Zoom has been a central tool as everyone shifts to digital meetings, happy hours and family dinners. As the virtual meeting platform has helped many to create their new normal, ‘Zoom-bombings’ and identified vulnerabilities have created uncertainty with the platform. Here is some advice on what you can do to protect yourself, your company and your productivity.
How to Limit Risks
The question on everyone’s mind is “How do I protect myself from these intrusions and continue to use Zoom?”.
Brite did a round-up on Zoom and virtual meeting’s best practices.
- Keep your meetings private. Make sure your meetings are not listed as Public, and utilize the new ‘private’ function that requires a password for your meetings. Public meetings are susceptible to Zoom-bombings!
- Add a wait room for all virtual meetings, especially large groups or webinars. This provides the ability to individually accept each person in the room in real time.
- Lock the meeting. Just as you would at your house, close the door after you let each person in. By locking the meeting, additional people are not able to join.
- Refrain from posting the meeting link or meeting ID on any social media. Deliver it directly to your audience via email or another direct chat.
- If you are holding larger meetings, designate a person as a moderator to actively review the list. This person will act as your virtual bouncer and dismiss or mute attendees. Webinars give panelists greater control of who can communicate, share video or desktops.
- Don’t ever click on a link in the chat unless you are 100% confident of the content and know exactly who it is from. Be vigilant, Just like with email or any link from an unknown place.
Many of the Zoom incidents have been due to poor virtual meeting practices. If these digital environments and invitations are protected, there is much less risk of falling victim.
Alternatives
Zoom is one of many virtual meeting platforms out there. We cannot avoid digital meetings in our current world. Their easy to use platform provide a channel for collaboration and socialization. If you are looking for alternatives, here are a few we at Brite have used and had success with, too.
GoToMeeting
WebEx
Join.me
Uberconference
Microsoft Teams – see how Brite is using this for internal communications and collaboration