CIO Brief: Collaboration Tools Are Now Critical Infrastructure
Retrospective: this article looks back at events from April 2020, written in 2026 with the benefit of hindsight.
The short version: In 2020, uninvited strangers began crashing online meetings — "Zoom-bombing." It was a wake-up call: video meetings had become as important as email, but their security settings were barely managed.
Why collaboration tools are critical infrastructure
Board meetings, customer negotiations, HR conversations and strategy discussions now happen in Teams and Zoom. The recordings, chats and shared files that come with them are business records. An outage or breach of these tools is a business disruption.
The business impact
- Confidentiality risk in sensitive meetings.
- Reputational harm from public disruptions.
- Compliance obligations for recordings and chats.
Questions to ask your team
- Who can join our meetings without being admitted, and can anonymous people join at all?
- Do executives and HR use stricter meeting settings?
- Where are meeting recordings stored, who can access them, and how long do we keep them?
- What would we do if our collaboration platform was unavailable for a day?
What good looks like
Sensible default meeting settings, stricter templates for sensitive meetings, retention rules for recordings, and a continuity plan for collaboration outages.
The decision
Ask for a short review of meeting settings for executive and HR meetings. It's quick and protects your most sensitive conversations.
- Zoom-Bombing (Apr 2020): What It Taught Us About Teams Meeting Security Incident Teardowns
- How to Lock Down Microsoft Teams Meeting Policies and Lobby Settings How-To & Hardening
- Detecting Meeting Hijacking: Defender XDR and Sentinel Hunting Queries Detection & Response