Dive Brief:
- Nearly 60% of employees use video conferencing on the job, according to a survey of more than 1,300 business professionals in the U.S. conducted in June by video conferencing company Lifesize. Video conferencing services are most valued by remote employees.
- More than half of respondents said more collaborative companies use video conferencing, empowering a "user-driven culture," according to the report. More than one-third of respondents said video conferencing makes them feel more valued and included by their company.
- However, 18% of professionals have failed to take video conferencing security — such as the potential of bad actors intercepting personal data — into consideration. Only one-fifth of professionals think video conferencing is "very secure."
Dive Insight:
Employees want to communicate at work like they do in their personal lives and industry is responding.
The market is expanding to fit businesses' need of visual communication: it's projected to grow by 4.4% year-over-year in 2019, according to Gartner. Synergy Research expects market value to surpass $1.5 billion this year.
"We're firmly in an era where cloud-based video conferencing tools win the day," Bobby Beckmann, CTO at Lifesize, told CIO Dive in an email. "Business professionals really do believe video conferencing will have an immense impact on the future of work."
The collaboration market is saturated with solutions, though industry has its favorites, including Slack, Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Legacy tools, including Cisco Webex and GoToMeeting, are also market mainstays.
Software as a service tools are pushing codec room systems aside. Cloud-based services allow companies to scale freely, free up IT management and take advantage of interoperability.
However, because there are so many available solutions, employees can often engage in shadow IT, downloading free versions of communication tools. The rise of unaccounted for communication apps leaves a hole in a company's security strategy.
Non-technical employees "simply aren't aware of or informed about some of the elements that also make video conferencing security quite a bit more complex," according to Beckmann. While most solutions have built-in security, there are missing links in areas like end-to-end encryption or compliance with WebRTC or SIP protocols.