Making collaboration efficient and most importantly mobile isn’t always an easy task for small businesses. With the European GDPR regulation customer contact is now regulated, having a large impact on businesses in the maintenance, repair, service or construction industry. These businesses need to comply to the same regulations as Europe’s largest companies.

Not that long ago, a company’s board of directors would meet once a year to be briefed on cybersecurity. The discussion would be brief, and it certainly wouldn’t be strategic. Today, things have changed. Boards not only have a responsibility to protect shareholder value (by protecting company assets held digitally), but there are also regulatory and personal liabilities that could come from a data breach.

Nearly every single company uses email as the main platform for communication. The problem? Emails are among the easiest platforms to hack, intercept and carry company-debilitating viruses. Unfortunately for businesses, emails and free app communications will pose a permanent risk to companies who wish to maintain uninterrupted regular day-to-day operations.

Every year we ask executives a series of questions on key topics. This year we chose to focus on communication, security, privacy, and regulation as these have been hot topics in 2018. We asked more than 300 executives from the US and Europe about their views on some key topics.

We started talking about Messaging Layer Security (MLS) last December and we would now like to give an overview of what was discussed during the second MLS interim meeting that was held on 14th and 15th of January 2019 in Mountain View, CA. Wire is a founding member of the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) IETF working group and continues to contribute with ideas and code.

More often than not teams need to work alongside contractors, clients or suppliers. Sometimes temporary but sometimes long-term. Emails are becoming dated and private messengers have no place in business. The possibility to communicate securely and fast with externals without granting too much access, is of great value. Why not use the proven secure collaboration platform already in use and extend that to partners?

We have found time to squeeze in yet another feature release before the end of a very successful year. Read receipts are now available on all platforms and devices!

The end of the year marks a good time to reflect on the passed year and the achievements made by the team. 2018 was, in many ways, a landmark year for Wire. From a product perspective we launched Wire Pro, our business product, in early 2018 and later added Wire Red, our unique crisis collaboration tool, to our product line. That in itself was a big milestone for us. We can now see business’ over five continents using our products.

Messaging Layer Security (MLS) is a new end-to-end encrypted protocol that is developed by an IETF workgroup. Wire initiated the idea, along with Mozilla and Cisco, in 2016 with other contributors joining the efforts later: the University of Oxford, Facebook, INRIA, Google, Twitter. MLS’s major goals are to make end-to-end encrypted messaging in (large) groups efficient and more secure and to become an open standard.

Focus on security and privacy has been important for Wire from day one. Over the years we've taken numerous steps to strengthen our technology and sharpen our privacy-by-design approach to our product and business model. This is more relevant than ever with many starting to realize the destructive effects of weak security and lack of privacy on both day-to-day business operations, and our lives as people who trust our most intimate details to various online services.