How to Use Mattermost for Secure Collaboration
When we ask our customers what IT teams appreciate most about Mattermost, security is often at the top of the list. The fine-grained control of Mattermost capabilities and the ownership of their critical data within Mattermost are the two most cited benefits. But ownership of data also implies responsibility, and much of the burden of this responsibility is placed on IT to manually execute. We understand that there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution to the requirements of keeping data safe, so we’ve built multiple layers of security and compliance features to support an organization’s unique needs.
Let’s dive into how teams use the Mattermost platform to deploy secure, compliant collaboration solutions to help teams like yours move faster, securely.
Secure Infrastructure Keeps Data Secure
In recent years, software developers have seen their role evolve from purely development into operators of the infrastructure that their code runs on. The DevOps movement recognizes the need for developers to collaborate across teams and functions to operate efficiently. However, this collaborative space becomes a double-edged sword for the internal teams that manage their company’s most vital information and intellectual property— data must be easily accessible for employees but also secure. Mattermost’s platform capabilities have evolved with that mindset and make it easy for your team to move quickly while meeting compliance obligations along the way.
We provide Mattermost as a self-hosted deployment. This means your customers can choose to host data in their network behind their firewall or in their own private cloud. We also provide a Cloud deployment, providing all the advantages of a typical SaaS platform, with the unique capability of having the data in a private isolated environment, fully managed by us, removing the overhead of maintaining and updating self-hosted instances.
Features for Secure Onboarding and Scaling
When new employees onboard at a company, Mattermost is often one of the first tools they use. Secure access to Mattermost is paramount; being part of the right group on day one means that the newest member of your team has access to the right information to start being productive while giving your organization the peace of mind that security and compliance requirements are being met.
Mattermost has multi-factor authentication capabilities with the ability to enforce usage for all users. Support for LDAP/AD ensures changes to your organization are synchronized and the right team members have access, ensuring a great first-day experience. SAML or OpenID Connect integrations remove the inconvenience of having to remember another password to yet another system. Multi-server support allows your organization to scale Mattermost and keep the user experience consistent as your employee base grows.
Sometimes teams need to delegate specific permissions in order to scale operations. Mattermost can help teams evolve while maintaining the perfect level of controls needed to stay secure and compliant, without completely overhauling processes. For example, you can delegate control of Channels to different end users so your IT team doesn’t get swamped with low-value requests, such as adding members to a channel or changing the channel name.
As your organization grows, different levels of access can be customized as employees change roles in the organization. You can assign different permissions to members, channel admins, team admins and even assign specialty admins to help manage portions of your system or user management. You have full control to determine what users and guests can do within channels; whether they can post, react, or reply to posts.
Compliance and Data Access to Respond to Incidents
We often receive customer questions after an internal issue surfaces — such as one of their employees being investigated for harassment or a leak of a customer’s account data in the messaging platform. Moments like these can pose a serious risk to an organization but mitigating them is easier with Mattermost’s Compliance export capabilities which integrate with legal discovery software to assist investigations. Administrators can sometimes get confused with untracked system configuration changes. These can be easily investigated with the extensive logging capabilities offered as part of the platform, so even when something unexpected happens, you can get to the bottom of the problem independently and improve your compliance workflows. Connecting Mattermost to other dashboarding and reporting tools can even help your team take communications to the highest levels of security, normally seen only for NOC and SOC.
At other times, regulation dictates requirements to archive data or even destroy data. Mattermost enables you to automatically export data to a compliance archive system for e-discovery and set data retention within channels and teams to make sure messaging is compliant with your organization’s policies. Additionally, with full ownership of the database and servers, you are able to have full visibility and control over your data’s security.
Trusted Collaboration Tools Create Stronger Teams
Trust is an essential component of collaboration. If your team has made the decision to stay remote — and become increasingly reliant on digital communications — trusting the tools you use to share information across the organization is critical. Teams that use Mattermost feel confident in their ability to share whatever they need to share, from code snippets and customer contracts to sensitive information about security risks. That assurance gives you the ability to collaborate more effectively and quickly.
Want to learn more? Learn more about how security-focused teams are using Mattermost for secure collaboration by reading our Customer stories.
