Best Practices for Securing Your Zoom Meetings

In this guide, learn about how you can secure your virtual meetings. The following content is separated into three distinct sections. The first section focuses on all the steps you can take to secure your meeting before it starts. The second section highlights all the controls that a Zoom Meeting host has at their disposal during a Zoom Meeting. The final section highlights a list of additional resources available to continue learning and become a Zoom Meeting expert.

Part 1: Pre-Meeting Settings

With meeting settings in the Zoom web portal and the Zoom application, securing your Zoom Meetings can start before your event even begins.

PRO TIP: Turn on Your Waiting Room

One of the best ways to secure your meeting is to turn on Zoom’s Waiting Room feature. Some Zoom users, like those in education, will have this feature turned on by default. This feature provides a virtual waiting room for your attendees and allows you to admit individual meeting participants into your meeting at your discretion.

Don’t Use Personal Meeting ID for Public Meetings

Your Personal Meeting ID (PMI) is the default meeting that launches when you start and ad hoc meeting. Your PMI doesn’t change unless you change it yourself, which makes it very useful if people need a way to reach you. But for public meetings, you should always schedule new meetings with randomly generated meeting IDs. That way, only invited attendees will know how to join your meeting. You can also turn off your PMI when starting an instant meeting in your profile settings.

Only Allow Registered or Domain Verified Users

Zoom can also give you peace of mind by letting you know exactly who will be attending your meeting. When scheduling a meeting, you can require attendees to register with their e-mail, name, and custom questions. You can even customize your registration page with a banner and logo. By default, Zoom also restricts participants to those who are logged into Zoom, and you can even restrict it to Zoom users who’s email address uses a certain domain. (For example, if your meeting is for NIU users only, require the niu.edu email domain.)

Part 2: In-Meeting Settings

Once your Zoom Meeting is off and running you’ll have access to a number of helpful features that put you in total control.

PRO TIP: Master the Security Menu

Zoom now puts all your essential security options in a single button, right in the in-meeting menu. Under this menu you’ll be able to lock your meeting and prevent any new participants from joining. You’ll also be able to enable Waiting Room to help manage new meeting participants and be able to control any sharing and chat permissions of individuals and all attendees.

Control Screen Sharing

Allowing participants to screen share in a meeting can be a great way to collaborate, but that can also leave you open to unwanted interruptions during larger meetings. Zoom gives you the ability to determine if you want other participants in the meeting to be able to share their screens, or if you want to be the only one with that ability. You can easily toggle this feature on and off from the screen sharing menu, as well as the security menu.

Turn Off Annotation

Like screen sharing and in-meeting chat, annotation can be a great tool when you need it, but it can also be an opportunity for mischief when you don’t. To avoid unwanted annotation, Zoom allows you as the meeting host to remove all participants ability to annotate during a screen share. You can disable this for the entire meeting, or just temporarily.

Make Someone a Co-Host

All the features we’ve covered so far are only accessible to meeting hosts, ensuring that hosts are the only ones with total control over a meeting. But what if you need a helping hand to manage all your participants? You can promote a trusted meeting attendee to Co-Host, allowing them many of the same privileges and control features available to the meeting host themselves. To learn about the difference between a host and co-host, view this support article.

Part 3: Additional Resources for Enhancing Security

When it comes to Zoom’s security, Zoom's most important asset is their users and how they utilize the product.

If you still have questions about specific features or functionality, we have three resources you may find helpful. The Zoom Help Center has thousands of support articles on all things Zoom. Zoom also runs weekly webinar trainings, or we have recordings you can access immediately, and the Zoom Blog is a great source of new Zoom use cases and stories.