While email communications aren’t quite on the level of messenger pigeons and handwritten correspondence, they’re looking increasingly creaky. Instead of the relatively static back-and-forth of emails and potentially risky attachments, people have been increasingly turning to more modern communications solutions inside and outside of the workplace.
This trend was only sped up by the sudden shift to remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic. Zoom usage skyrocketed from 10 million daily users in December 2019 to 300 million six months later. Slack saw 25 percent growth between March 10 and March 25 in 2020 alone.
Now that the pandemic has cooled down (for now), communications apps are still ubiquitous in the workplace, with apps like WhatsApp business seeing 300 percent growth between June 2020 and July 2023 (50 million to 300 million users). Love or hate them, these apps represent an overall improvement in helping remote and onsite workers alike collaborate, share files and information, and handle incoming requests.
This all raises an important question: Is this actually a good idea?
If you look at the positives, the answer would be an obvious yes. Third party communication apps are powerful, convenient, and typically inexpensive. By putting an entire office or business onto a single app means a lot less guesswork about how to contact colleagues, where important information is stored, and reduces the need for meetings.
The trade-off here starts to look less appealing when you consider what using these third-party apps actually entail. In short, your company is handing over some, if not most, of its internal communication to a third-party with often-questionable privacy policies and security practices.
To any businesses that traffic in user data, or to cybercriminals, the information being transmitted is a goldmine. Employee names, interests, work habits, client information, income, expenses, logins and passwords are all constantly being transmitted back and forth, in addition to run of the mill personal correspondence and information. Communication from HR? Your home phone number? Your co-worker’s kid’s Little League stats? All of these are just being handed over to companies, who, in the cases of Meta and Google, have long track records of not using it responsibly.
The question of security is also paramount. One of the most appealing elements of third-party apps is that they can incorporate other apps and services. While this can be a boost to productivity (sending a link in Slack to Asana and Google Drive is certainly more convenient than using all three separately), every app increases a business’s attackable surface. The same goes for every device used to access these services. Your office computer can be as well-protected as possible, but the old Android phone you use to connect to WhatsApp to pass files to a colleague may not be.
This isn’t to view messaging and communications apps too pessimistically; if they didn’t work well, they wouldn’t be ubiquitous in our personal and professional lives. But it is important to keep the potential risks and drawbacks in mind before basing the entirety of a business and its livelihood on any of them.
Wondering which communication app is a good fit for your office? Worried about the privacy and security risks in using them? Nodal can help! Contact us today.