Follow These Key Dos and Don'ts to Help Secure Your Zoom Room

As the hybrid workforce slowly becomes a reality, some employees will return to work safely, while others may remain remote, or a mix of both. Organizations will need to find ways to keep their distributed workforce connected and ensure all employees can engage in the same collaborative experience. That’s where conference rooms solutions like Zoom Rooms come in.

Designed to integrate the same intuitive Zoom experience into your conference rooms, Zoom Rooms include useful features that help all participants — regardless of location — feel like they have an equitable presence in a conference room setting.

But as companies begin to adopt solutions like Zoom Rooms to support their hybrid workforce, it’s important to learn how to deploy the right security features so they can provide a safe and productive meeting space from the start.

Security underpins all of our innovations here at Zoom, and Zoom Rooms is no exception. When joining a meeting from a Zoom Room, you have the same type of Zoom Meetings security features at your fingertips.

Zoom Rooms are reinforced through a hardware partner security evaluation process, our 256-bit AES-GCM encryption, and a robust set of security features. Similar to Zoom Meetings, these Zoom Rooms features are designed to protect user and meeting privacy, as well as promote the seamless Zoom experience. 

To tailor Zoom Rooms’ security features to your needs and lock down your conference room meeting, here are a few dos and don'ts you should follow:

Do:

• Leverage the Security icon: Whenever you start a meeting in your Zoom Room, a Security icon will be available at the bottom of your screen or on your Zoom Rooms Controller. You can use this icon to take a number of safety measures, with options such as “Lock Meeting,” “Enable the Waiting Room,” “Suspend Participant Activities,” and more.
• Hide host and ID from private meetings: This is a setting admins can enable in the Zoom Rooms account settings when they want to keep the meeting host and meeting ID, in addition to the meeting topic, hidden from the Zoom Rooms display for private meetings.
• Send whiteboard to internal contacts only: For additional security, Zoom Rooms for Touch whiteboards can be restricted to only allow sharing with internal users. This option can be enabled account-wide or at the device level by admins. 
• Require encryption for third-party endpoints: Zoom offers a setting to require encryption for H323/SIP third-party endpoints, a setting that can be enabled by the host of a meeting or by an admin for all users and accounts. If this setting is selected, those dialing in via SIP/H.323 will be required to use encryption when dialing into the Zoom meeting.
• Enable a passcode to exit the Zoom Rooms application and alter settings: Admins can enable a Room Passcode for Zoom Rooms, which requires a 1-16 digit numeric lock code. This helps prevent users from making setting changes on the Zoom Room controller or closing the Zoom Room application on the computer. Be sure to change the passcode from the default one.

Don’t:

• Show the sharing key on-screen in public spaces: A sharing key is just one of the ways participants can connect to a Zoom Room to share content. If an outsider gets ahold of a key, they could potentially share unwanted content in the meeting — so remain vigilant about displaying sharing keys in public spaces. 
• Automatically accept incoming camera control: Be sure to carefully analyze any incoming requests for camera control, as allowing an outside party to control your camera could lead to potential meeting disruptions. 
• Automatically start scheduled meetings: Admins can configure all the Zoom Rooms in an account to automatically start or stop based on calendars. If you share a conference space with others or another party has access to your conference room, you want to disable this feature to prevent any unwarranted access to your calls. 
• Use Room Meeting ID when starting an instant meeting: All Zoom Rooms are automatically assigned a Room Meeting ID. If you share the Room Meeting ID for an instant meeting, anyone with the number could potentially join any meeting that's using that ID in the future. 

With these tips and tricks, Zoom Rooms users can enjoy seamless and secure collaboration while avoiding potential disruptions. 

By keeping security top of mind as they operationalize the hybrid workforce, organizations can create a realistic and scalable approach to security that will evolve as they do. With safe and effective collaboration underpinning operations, businesses can both mitigate risk and maintain flexibility and scalability.

To learn more about Zoom privacy and security, explore our Trust Center, and to discover how you can enable the everywhere workforce, check out our Building Forward webpage.