Cyberattacks on the rise, employees working from home, documents in digital format… The digital transformation is having an impact not only on how strategic company meetings are organised, but also on how they are exposed to risks.
While online collaborative tools have emerged and proven useful to organisations as a way to manage such meetings, not many of them offer an optimal level of data security.
Let’s take a look at what risk factors drive organisations to integrate secure management solutions for their online strategic meetings.
Increasingly exposed organisations
Let’s start with a simple observation: the situation regarding cyberattacks is worrying. According to the latest report from the French National Agency for Information Systems Security (ANSSI), the number of reported proven intrusions into information systems increased by 37% between 2020 and 2021.
It is worth noting that such cyberattacks can cause serious financial damage, even leading to bankruptcy.
For example, the high-end lingerie group Lise Charmel had to go into receivership to protect itself after a cyberattack.
Beyond technical vulnerabilities, hackers benefit from the widespread use of strategic meetings in hybrid format.
For example, financial audit meetings, annual accounts presentations, and board meetings are ideal points of entry for would-be intruders.
Such crucial meetings for the management of organisations are an opportunity to access confidential documents exchanged between the participants, regardless of the type of organisation (SMEs, large corporations, operators of essential services, etc.).
Moving towards greater awareness of data security sovereignty and standards
It is one thing to have a solution that makes your data secure, but it is also important to know what form that security takes and its scope of application.
One example of a case that perfectly illustrates this need for specific protection of sensitive data is the French administration’s recent decision to take action to protect sensitive data in its possession.
As a result, those data must no longer be hosted on Microsoft 365 cloud services, to protect them from possible security breaches or even “misuse by United States intelligence agencies”.
Indeed, the United States government enacted a federal law called the “Cloud Act”, which grants it access to data hosted on cloud services provided by American companies, (AWS, Azure, GCP), even if those data belong to foreign companies.
As such, the choice of an online strategic meeting management solution must take the hosting of the data into consideration.
Companies must choose whether their data is hosted at a datacenter in Europe or elsewhere.
It is worth mentioning the “SecNumCloud” label issued by the ANSSI, which guarantees the application of the strictest European legal framework in terms of data protection.
Beyond adapting to the era of hybrid work, the choice of a secure solution for the management of strategic meetings is essential for reasons of data access, protection of sensitive documents against cyberattacks, internal trust on the part of the participants, and finally compliance with the applicable regulations.
