Zoom is focusing on enterprise and regulated industries in its latest crop of updates to its business subscriptions.
On Sept. 24, Zoom announced several new add-on products for enterprise customers. The features bolster the existing, robust portfolio of Zoom’s offerings and are intended to help organizations meet their compliance, security, privacy, survivability, and manageability requirements.
Zoom announces four advanced enterprise offerings
The new add-ons available for Zoom Workplace and Zoom Business Services are:
- Zoom Compliance Manager Plus: An update to the Zoom Compliance Manager, which was released in March. This offering adds risk detection, data loss protection, and advanced trends analysis. Zoom positions industries such as finance, healthcare, and government agencies as the key customers for Zoom Compliance Manager Plus.
- Zoom Meeting Survivability: Provides protections in place against downtime in the case of natural disaster or problems with a carrier. Specifically, Zoom Meeting Survivability uses Zoom Node, which shifts the meeting to a local server to be hosted on-premises.
- Zoom Mesh: Previously only available for Zoom Webinars and Events, Zoom Mesh has been extended to Zoom Meetings. This feature optimizes bandwidth usage for a smoother experience.
- Zoom Customer Managed Key (CMK) Hybrid: Adds more options for managing encryption keys and protecting company data. Previously, this was done through Zoom’s CMK data privacy offering. With CMK Hybrid, customers can manage encryption and decryption on-premises. CMK Hybrid will be available in the fourth quarter of 2024.
“Our goal is to make communication and collaboration on Zoom foolproof, future-proof, and fail-proof,” said Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom, in a press release.
SEE: Zoom offers VoIP phone on a pay-as-you-go plan, too — is it a good fit for your business?
These features are available as paid add-ons to Zoom Workplace Enterprise licenses.
Zoom rebranded its entire portfolio as Zoom Workplace, so the plan tiers include free, Pro and Business options. All options come with whiteboard functionality, plus email service and documents — potentially an effort for the tech company to compete with Google’s business suite.
TechRepublic has reached out to Zoom Workplace for additional release and pricing information.
How do Zoom’s features compare with competitors?
Zoom’s major competitors are Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. Google Meet offers client-side encryption and various compliance tools through Google Workspace. Conversely, Microsoft Teams users can turn on end-to-end encryption. Microsoft’s equivalent of Customer Managed Key hybrid is the 365 Customer Key, which provides encryption at the application layer for data at rest.
The best compliance service for your organization will depend on the specific needs of your industry. However, it’s hard to overlook the strong integration of Google Workspace and Microsoft Teams in many professional settings, where they are already widely adopted.