10 Ways to Secure Your Next Zoom Meeting

The COVID-19 pandemic uncovered many challenges organizations face with enabling and supporting remote work. Companies, teachers, and others are turning their communication efforts to Zoom, a leader in modern enterprise video communications, with easy, reliable video and audio conferencing systems.

As millions of people look to Zoom as a go-to source of video and audio conferencing, it’s essential to keep your meetings safe and secure. This blog highlights a few best practices to make sure you’re meetings are secure before, during, and after.

Here are 10 ways to enhance your meeting security.

1. Use a unique ID for large or “public” calls
   1. When you schedule a Zoom meeting, look for the Meeting ID Options, and choose Generate Automatically. Doing so can plug up one of the most significant holes hackers can exploit.
2. Create an invite-only meeting
   1. 1. This might seem juvenile, but when the meeting is invite-only, the participants must sign in with the email address you used to invite them.
3. Require a meeting password
   1. Implementing a password can increase your Zoom meeting safety ten-fold. Give the password out only to those who are reliable, credible, and should be attending the call. To protect your meeting with a password, schedule a meeting, and check the box next to “require meeting password.”
4. Create a waiting room
   1. When participants log into the call, they will be directed into the virtual waiting room. This gives the host an opportunity to let people into the call manually or accept all attendees at once. This process allows the host to decline access to names they do not recognize.
5. Lock a meeting once it begins
   1. 1. When the Zoom meeting beings, navigate to the bottom of the screen and click Manage Participants. The participants panel will open and at the bottom click More > Lock Meeting.
6. Only the hosts should share their screen
   1. Make sure the Zoom call settings are set to allow only the hosts to share their screen. You can set this up in advance or even during the call.
7. Kick someone out or put them on hold
   1. If a participant is questionable, go to the Participant Panel and hover over the name of the person you would want to boot or place on hold. Options will appear, choose Remove.
8. Disable someone’s camera
   1. If you need to allow participants to share their screen, that is perfectly OK. But, if a participant is rude or inappropriate while on the video chat, the host can open the Participant Panel and click on the video icon next to the person’s name. This will deactivate their camera
9. Prevent animated GIFs and other files in the chat
   1. Participants can share these items in the chat, unless the meeting is set up not to allow these items.
10. Disable private chat
    1. To do this, open Settings in the Zoom Web Application (it’s not available on the desktop app). Go to Personal > Settings, then click in Meeting (Basic). Scroll until you see Private Chat and make sure the button is disabled.

Perficient’s Organizational Change Management Chief Strategist David Chapman recently shared a video that discussed what you can do to ensure that your employees can collaborate and communicate with each other (and their customers) regardless of where they are located. He discusses what steps you need to take to roll out collaboration and communication tools effectively and how you can ensure the adoption of these new technologies.