We’ve all felt the shift. What used to be phone calls are now video calls. It’s fast, convenient, and, for the average organization, it’s secure enough.
But “secure enough” doesn’t cut it when your conversations are mission critical. When you’re sharing classified information, coordinating military operations, or handling national infrastructure plans, you start asking different questions. Questions like: Where is this data going? Who’s really listening? What would happen if this meeting was compromised?
That’s the world where secure video collaboration comes in.
I’ve spent the better part of my career working on video conferencing systems – from my early TANDBERG days to helping build Pexip’s support and engineering teams from the ground up. And one thing I’ve learned is this: not every meeting should happen on a general-purpose platform. It’s not because those tools are bad. It’s because they weren’t built for this.
Secure meetings were born out of a real and growing need, a gap that traditional tools were not designed to fill. Most mainstream video platforms were built to scale fast and work anywhere, but that design comes with trade-offs. They lean on public access, shared infrastructure, global data routing, and one-size-fits-all approach that simply don’t work when you’re dealing with classified content or national security discussions.
And then the threat landscape changed. What used to be a question of “could someone accidentally join this meeting?” has become “how do we stop nation-state actors from accessing our live communications?” That’s not an exaggeration. Deepfake impersonation is real. Espionage is real. And the consequences of getting it wrong are massive.
We’ve entered an era where verifying identity isn’t optional…it’s foundational. Where sovereignty isn’t just about data residency, it’s about operational control. And where security that slows people down is security that will get bypassed.
This is the tension we live in every day: how do we make meetings secure enough for the highest levels of government and defense, without making them so locked down that they become unusable?
To me, this is how we empower people to achieve their goals and fulfill their missions. When security is seamless. When policies are applied in the background. When users don’t need to think about compliance because it’s always working for them. That’s when you know the platform is doing its job.
Secure collaboration exists because the stakes have changed. The threats got smarter, the environments got more complex, and the expectation of control – true, granular, operational control – became non-negotiable.
And we’re not done. As new risks emerge, so will new approaches to securing video collaboration. But the principle remains the same: enable trusted conversations in environments where trust can’t be assumed.