Last month, Microsoft announced that Teams, its communication and collaboration service for organizations, had reached 13 million daily active users, surpassing rival Slack, which has about 10 million daily active users. With the software giant utilizing its dominance in enterprise and bundling Teams with Office 365, Slack is trying to improve its security features to attract more large enterprise customers.
Just weeks after the company released a faster and more efficient version of its desktop app, Slack has now announced several new security and compliance features that give IT administrators more control over the way employees access and share their organization’s data.
As part of the new features, administrators can now require an additional authentication layer for mobile app users that utilizes Face ID, Touch ID, or passcodes generated at the app level. Additionally, if a device is lost or stolen, the affected user’s session can be remotely wiped via new session management tools. In a future update, administrators will also have the ability to define the number of devices an employee can be logged in to simultaneously, require users to always use the latest version of the app, as well as detect and block jailbroken devices.
The company also announced new domain whitelisting tools that prevent employees from accessing unapproved workspaces to ensure sensitive information does not leak out to non-managed workspaces. In addition, there are now new options to restrict file downloads on mobile devices and to disable the ability to copy messages. The company is also working on similar functionality for desktop computers, with administrators soon being able to restrict file downloads to approved IP addresses only. And on the mobile side, they will be able to force all links to open in specific browsers.
Slack is hoping that all these new security features will make administrators feel more comfortable using their service in large organizations that often have stricter security and compliance requirements, helping the company to better compete against the enterprise juggernaut that is Microsoft.
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