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Business Instant Messenger: What makes it secure?

When a business gets burned by a security leak for the first time they almost always discover that an instant messaging program was used. This can come in the form of passwords being conned out of an employee, a file with a virus sent through a file transfer, or important messages being intercepted by a third party. Whatever the reason or circumstances, whether you are trying to patch the security hole before you get burned or you just went through your first bad experience, security is likely one of your top priorities.

Three major types of security are used in a modern business instant messenger. The first is control – who can chat with whom. The second is encryption – scrambling of data. The third is virus scanning – making sure files do not contain viruses.

Control
Easily the most important but difficult to enforce type of security is controlling who can chat with your employees. Actually, with Brosix this is easy, but just try to tell your employees to only chat with fellow employees while using a public instant messenger. It just doesn’t happen. This means that anybody, anywhere, can communicate with your staff, leaving them open to exploitation.

Encryption
Scrambling the data using keys is called encryption. This means that chats and files that might be intercepted look scrambled and are unusable. Make sure your business instant messenger also encrypts files that are sent. Brosix includes this feature since so many clients share sensitive documents over the instant messaging network.

Virus scanning
Making sure a file does not contain a virus is called virus scanning. Just about any file can contain a virus in one form or another. This makes any kind of file sharing functionality a high risk. The problem is that files with viruses can be received in other ways such as email or carried in on a USB stick. Having virus scanning on your secure instant messenger adds one more layer of protection should someone knowingly or unknowingly attempt to spread a virus.

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