Zoom is focusing on businesses and regulated industries in its latest round of updates to its commercial subscriptions.
On September 24, Zoom announced several new add-on products for enterprise customers. The features bolster Zoom’s existing robust portfolio of offerings and aim to help organizations meet their compliance, security, privacy, survivability, and manageability requirements.
Zoom announces four advanced enterprise offerings
New add-ons available for Zoom Workplace and Zoom Business Services include:
- Zoom Plus Compliance Manager: An update to Zoom Compliance Manager, which was launched in March. This offering adds risk detection, data loss protection, and advanced trend analysis. Zoom positions industries such as finance, healthcare, and government agencies as key customers of Zoom Compliance Manager Plus.
- Zoom Meeting Survivability: Provides protection against downtime in the event of natural disasters or operator issues. Specifically, Zoom Meeting Survivability uses Zoom Node, which moves the meeting to a local server for on-premise hosting.
- Zoom mesh: Zoom Mesh, previously only available for Zoom webinars and events, has been expanded to Zoom Meetings. This feature optimizes bandwidth usage for a smoother experience.
- Zoom Hybrid Customer Managed Key (CMK): Adds more options to manage encryption keys and protect 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 Q4 2024.
“Our goal is to make communication and collaboration on Zoom foolproof, future-proof and fail-safe,” said Smita Hashim, Zoom’s chief product officer, in a press release.
SEE: Zoom also offers VoIP telephony on a pay-as-you-go plan: is it a good option for your business?
These features are available as paid add-ons for Zoom Workplace Enterprise licenses.
Zoom has rebranded its entire portfolio as Zoom Workplace, so plan tiers include free, Pro, and Business options. All options include whiteboard functionality, plus email and document service, which is possibly an effort by the tech company to compete with Google’s business suite.
TechRepublic has reached out to Zoom Workplace for additional information on the launch and pricing.
How do Zoom's features compare to its competitors?
Zoom's main competitors are Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. Google Meet offers client-side encryption and various compliance tools through Google Workspace. In contrast, Microsoft Teams users can turn on end-to-end encryption. Microsoft's equivalent to the hybrid Customer Managed Key is 365 Customer Key, which provides application-layer encryption 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 environments, where they have already been widely adopted.
