Secure Slack Adoption: What You Need to Know

The digital transformation of the modern workplace brought with it new ways of communicating and collaborating. Tools like Slack offer immeasurable benefits to the company that can harness them safely and securely. In this post, we review the top Slack adoption challenges holding businesses back, and the steps they can take to overcome them.

What are the benefits of Slack?

Collaboration tools like Slack have replaced email as the primary way that employees collaborate at work. Slack offers a robust and efficient platform for managing teams, group work, and one-to-one chats. Its real-time messaging enables remote and distributed teams to co-work effectively across time zones, eliminating the delays associated with traditional communication methods.

Slack also provides a repository where files and documents can be shared, either natively or through integrations with third-party apps and services like Google Drive, Dropbox, Trello, and more. This also creates a living repository of work history that supports new employee onboarding, knowledge preservation and transfer, and provides important context into past decisions.

Slack itself is available on a wide range of platforms, including desktop applications, web browsers, and mobile devices, offering increased flexibility to keep employees connected, and today Slack is also an important part of many company cultures. To support this, Slack enables social features such as emojis, gifs, and reactions, and encourages the blurring of personal and business communications.

Top Slack adoption challenges

Despite these benefits, Slack doesn’t come without risk. In democratizing access to company data, Slack can also introduce new dangers. How do companies handle legal holds, eDiscovery, or internal forensics in Slack data sets? The complexity of Slack’s messaging structure—not even admins may have complete visibility into all messages—can slow discovery, hide evidence, and provide cover for internal threat actors.

Compliance officers, too, may object to rolling out Slack. How do organizations comply with records retention policies in Slack, especially in highly regulated industries? And could they respond in time to a data subject access request (DSAR) under the GDPR or CCPA/CPRA?

The difficulty of finding data within Slack is a consequence of the way its channels and messages are structured. Simply, it’s a feature, not a bug, and that makes it harder to overcome. While legal and compliance teams may struggle to find the information they need in a timely manner, other users may stumble across proprietary and confidential data and exfiltrate it without leaving a trace. Retaining an indefinite record of all business communications, as Slack does for all paid plans by default, may result in sensitive data being compromised at a later date, but purging all Slack data can also create liabilities, as discovered.