Cisco Webex has launched Sovereign Controls for its European customers alongside Deutsche Telekom and Eviden.
These controls enable encryption keys for Webex Meetings, Messaging, and Calling User-Generated Information to be hosted and controlled by Deutsche Telekom or Eviden from within Europe for customers in small to large businesses, education, healthcare organisations, banking, public administration, and municipalities.
The new solution is an extension of Cisco’s EU data residency program, providing further controls for European customers over their data.
Javed Khan, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco Collaboration, spoke about the release of its sovereign controls:
“This new feature demonstrates Webex’s commitment to deliver cloud solutions that meet evolving European privacy and security requirements”.
“It paves the way for future sovereignty solutions for Government, highly-regulated industries, and the upcoming EUCS certification scheme.”
By storing encryption keys in local data centres, customers gain more control over the security of their User-Generated Information, such as meeting recordings and transcripts, messages, shared files, and voicemails.
In doing so, this creates extra protection for Webex’s privacy and security features and EU data residency program.
The sovereign management solution gives organisations a means of leveraging Webex’s cloud and collaboration capabilities while safeguarding their content within the EU.
Customers can choose a trusted European cloud provider and maintain control of their data at the same time, without having to pay to host their own encryption keys.
Customers will be able to purchase technical support if service requests are managed by EU nationals based inside the EU.
Zeina Zakhour, Vice President CTO Digital Security at Eviden, “We are proud to enable Webex customers to raise the level of control on their sensitive data by using our Encryption Services powered by Eviden’s in-house Trustway Proteccio hardware security module (HSM), the only HSM granted the Reinforced Qualification by the French National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI), in addition to Common Criteria EAL4+ certification and EU Restricted agreement.
“Developed, manufactured, and operated in Europe, our HSM is securely hosted in a data center outside the cloud.”
Webex has years of experience in end-to-end encryption (E2EE), offering Zero-Trust End-to-End Encryption for meetings and E2EE for user-generated content, which protects data from being intercepted. The data is encrypted while it is in transit and at rest so that only customers have continuous access to their meeting content.
EU data residency is already available via Webex, which enables customers to comply with local data requirements.
Webex is the first and only collaboration and conferencing solution to achieve the highest level of adherence with the EU Cloud Code of Conduct (EU Cloud CoC), demonstrating its compliance capabilities with the EU GDPR.
Furthermore, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) has acknowledged that the Court of Justice of the European Union’s use of Webex meets personal data processing rules. It is the only videoconferencing platform to have received this approval.
Webex is also the only collaboration platform to support full EU data residency. It has data centres in Frankfurt and Amsterdam, ensuring that European user data remains in the EU, from files, messages, and recordings, to analytics data, logs, user profiles, billing data, and more.
Meanwhile, European officials are investigating Microsoft’s bundling of Teams and Office 365 to determine whether it is “abusing” its market position.
