5 Questions CISOs Are Asking About Secure Collaboration in 2025

If 2020 forced companies to adopt collaboration platforms overnight, then 2025 is the year CISOs are reevaluating everything about them. It’s no longer just about “does it work?” but “does it work securely, at scale, and under scrutiny?” Today’s security leaders are facing a paradox: collaboration platforms have become critical infrastructure, yet many black boxes remain that resist audit, control, and customization. From global banks to defense contractors to AI startups, CISOs are asking sharper questions about the tools their teams rely on to communicate, coordinate, and respond to crises. Here are five questions shaping the secure collaboration agenda in 2025. 

1. How secure is the platform…really? 

“End-to-end encryption” shows up on nearly every vendor site, but its definition varies wildly. Some platforms encrypt in transit but decrypt on the server side. Others promise encryption at rest but offer limited transparency about how encryption keys are managed, or by whom. Most also still rely on centralized, cloud-only architectures that share tenancy across thousands of customers. This is where security leaders are digging deeper to know: 

• Who holds the keys? 
• Can data ever be accessed by the vendor or subpoenaed from shared infrastructure? 
• What is the platform’s vulnerability management process? 
• How are updates tested and deployed? 

In a recent Gartner report, over 40% of surveyed CISOs said their greatest concern with collaboration tools was the lack of visibility into backend security controls. The broader shift toward zero trust has only magnified these worries. Any platform that assumes implicit trust between services, or between the provider and the customer, is now under scrutiny. 

Strategic takeaway: Look for platforms that allow cryptographic control to remain inside your perimeter. This could include self-managed key vaults, bring-your-own-encryption models, or support for on-prem and hybrid deployment. 

2. Can we prove control over our data at all times? 

CISOs are increasingly being asked not just to secure data, but to demonstrate ownership and control in audits, third-party assessments, and board meetings. This shift is driven by regulatory evolution (e.g., DORA, NIS2, HIPAA updates), as well as the rise of operational risk frameworks like MITRE Shield and FAIR. 

Collaboration platforms, especially cloud-based ones, often operate in ways that obscure critical details: where data is stored, how long it’s retained, who has access, and what integrations may be siphoning off information. For regulated industries, this creates tension between agility and assurance. 

A 2024 report from the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) noted that collaboration data was involved in 27% of the compliance violations cited under GDPR Article 30 audits, often due to insufficient logging or unverified data residency claims. 

Security leaders are now asking: 

• Can we audit message history, metadata, and file transfers independently? 
• Do we control retention, deletion, and export processes? 
• What are the platform’s terms for data portability, especially during offboarding? 

Strategic takeaway: Favor systems that support transparent data governance. That includes immutable logs, admin-configurable retention policies, and local or sovereign data storage options—not just contractual assurances. 

3. What risks does AI introduce to collaboration platforms? 

Artificial intelligence has gone from novelty to necessity. In 2025, nearly every major collaboration tool now offers some AI-powered feature: summarizing threads, drafting responses, suggesting action items. But for CISOs, this is not as much a cause for celebration as a call for scrutiny. 

AI raises new attack surfaces, new compliance questions, and new vectors for data exposure. According to a 2024 Ponemon Institute survey, 52% of IT leaders did not know whether their collaboration vendor used customer data to train AI models. That’s a compliance disaster waiting to happen in industries governed by data localization, trade secrets, or export controls. 

The real issue is opacity. Few platforms disclose which LLMs are in use, how data is handled during inference, or whether prompts are stored. And when AI is bundled as a feature rather than an opt-in integration, CISOs are often left with little recourse. 

Strategic takeaway: Treat embedded AI features as third-party integrations until proven otherwise. Demand documentation, audit logs, and granular policy controls. Consider platforms that let you run AI locally or in a private cloud, separate from the collaboration provider’s infrastructure. 

4. Are we audit-ready in the middle of an incident? 

Collaboration platforms are central to modern incident response. Whether it’s a ransomware event, a DDoS campaign, or a compliance breach, teams now coordinate response efforts through chat, not email. But few tools are purpose-built for this reality. Security leaders are discovering that most platforms: 

• Lack structured response workflows (playbooks, tasking, role assignments) 
• Don’t preserve forensic logs suitable for postmortem review 
• Fail to integrate with SIEM/SOAR tools used by the broader security team 

This fragmentation leaves a dangerous gap between real-time coordination and long-term accountability. If you can’t recreate who said what, who approved what, and when key decisions were made, you’re exposed – not just operationally, but legally. 

Regulators are noticing. In a 2025 briefing, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) emphasized the need for communications systems that support “structured, timestamped, and replayable collaboration during major incidents.” 

Strategic takeaway: Select platforms that support incident playbooks, audit-grade logging, and integrations with ticketing, threat intel, and case management tools. Bonus: platforms that allow “clean room” environments for sensitive event coordination. 

5. Does our collaboration stack help or hinder our ops tempo? 

CISOs don’t just protect data, they protect outcomes. And nowhere is this more apparent than in high-tempo environments like DevSecOps, security operations centers (SOCs), and cloud infrastructure teams. In these settings, latency isn’t just inconvenient, it’s dangerous. 

Many enterprise-grade collaboration platforms were built for white-collar productivity, not technical velocity. They assume users operate via mouse and GUI, not CLI, bots, or automation scripts. Security leaders are now asking: 

• Can we trigger alerts or workflows from GitHub, Jira, or Jenkins in real time? 
• Can we deploy bots that act on custom rules, not just canned integrations? 
• Can our ops team resolve an incident without leaving the terminal? 

According to a 2024 DevOps Pulse survey, 43% of teams reported switching between four or more tools during critical events, leading to fragmented data and slower recovery. 

Strategic takeaway: Prioritize tools that support automation, API-first design, and deep integrations with the platforms your teams already use. The best platforms are “invisible”—they disappear into workflows rather than interrupting them. 

Final Reflection: From Commodity to Critical Infrastructure 

Collaboration tools used to be a matter of preference; design, user experience, cost. In 2025, they’ve become a matter of resilience. CISOs must now evaluate them like they would any other mission-critical system: for security, governance, observability, and interoperability. The right platform can reduce risk, streamline compliance, and accelerate incident response. The wrong one can delay mitigation, violate regulations, or expose sensitive data to AI model training. So, what’s the future-proof move? Not a silver bullet platform, but a set of principles: 

• Control your data. Don’t rent it. 
• Audit your workflows. Don’t assume compliance. 
• Question the defaults. Especially when it comes to AI. 
• Automate with intention. And demand transparency from every integration. 

Secure collaboration isn’t a feature. It’s a capability. In 2025, CISOs aren’t just asking questions, they’re rebuilding the foundations. 

Learn more about what high-stakes, complex organizations should consider as they uplevel their secure collaboration — meet with the Mattermost team at Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit.