This was the year that Zoom became a verb that everyone uses in context as it became “a critical service for everybody.”
Speaking as part of Druva’s Cloud Data Protection Summit, Druva CMO Thomas Been talked to Zoom corporate CIO Sunil Madan about the challenges the company has faced this year.
Madan said the mission of Zoom was to support businesses and to be frictionless and, in a secure way, get more things done. “This year has brought some unprecedented challenges for many organizations, including Zoom, with the exponential growth of the product, the consumption of the product and the global scale of the product – we had daily uses grow from 10 million to 300 million in a matter of weeks,” he said.
“We planned for over-subscription, but never by 30-times, that is unheard of, so we got together and figured out how to scale over-subscription, and luckily we have architected the product and could horizontally scale, whether at the data center or at the country or global level.”
He also said the company was designed as an enterprise product, but remote working made it a consumer product as well, and this made the company think about how to give a good experience for both.
Speaking on security and privacy challenges, Madan said there has been a “fair few challenges faced” as Zoom became a consumer product as well as a business product.
“That was the best change going forward, as we now look at ourselves through a different lens,” he said. “We put together a 90-day plan, we went through a security review, and put everything on hold for 90 days so we could take care of security and privacy.”
He said this enabled the company to come back “redefined” and with confidence for users, who know they are using a secure platform. Speaking on how the rapid change drove Zoom’s data protection strategy, Madan said COVID-19 has brought humanitarian challenges to the world, but “Zoom users are trying their best to stay connected.”
He said that everyone is looking for solutions, and most companies had gone through this accelerated transformation to remote working, and most organizations were not ready for it. “We’re dealing with a level of complexity at home and an IT team that was corporate and is now at home.”
This means that there is so much reliance on cloud, which he said “is saving humanity” as data protection and retention became important.