Tips for Securing Your Virtual Training Sessions

by Glen Vondrick

July 6, 2017

Last week, I wrote about what we believe are the three greatest threats to your virtual training sessions.  They are:

• The threat of hacked content
• The threat of leaked content
• And the threat of disrupted high-consequence training sessions

Knowing how your valuable virtual training and critical collaboration sessions are vulnerable is half the battle. But what can an organization do to strengthen its defenses?

Protecting a session’s sensitive content as well as the reliability of the session of itself can be surprisingly tricky—powering and protecting high consequence virtual training and web conferencing has become incredibly complex. This not only means meeting perfect reliability and performance standards, it means providing a layer of security and compliance that ensures the information being discussed, digitized, shared and stored is safe. It means ensuring sensitive data never falls into the wrong hands.

This, of course, is where CoSo Cloud excels. We deliver 99.99% uptime to a myriad of government agencies that require reliable collaboration for critical communications. Our platform and services have been used to facilitate crisis-communications regarding food tampering, drug recalls, and international disasters and emergencies. The U.S. military utilizes CoSo Cloud to provide secure training around the globe.

But there are some best practices all organizations can (and should) abide by whether they’re a client of ours or not. Consider:

• Only allowing registered attendees that you invite into meetings.
• Setting new passwords for specific meetings versus relying on the same password over and over again
• Instructing trainers to hand select who they let into rooms (vs. allowing automatic entry)
• Setting rank-based permission levels—i.e. low-level users only have access to Tier 3 content while high-level execs get access to Tiers 1-3 (this could apply to both live and on-demand content)
• Implementing Single Sign-On, which allows IT admins to quickly reset or revoke users with a single stroke across all company-owned properties
• Auditing records
• Requiring the security access cards or badges that govern your workers’ physical movements to access their virtual ones (card readers can be installed at all trainee computer terminals)

Remember, in today’s digital era, information is our weakest link. This makes online training sessions an especially vulnerable target, because not only is information transfer their sole purpose, too many organizations aren’t working hard enough to keep them secure.

After reading this, I hope your organization will no longer be among them.