In the face of an increasing number of cyberattacks and concerns about data hosting and protection, Thales’s Citadel Team messaging platform is teaming up with data management specialist OVHcloud, to provide users with the trusted, end-to-end security that they need.

These are troubled times for users of messaging platforms. The Covid-19 pandemic – with unprecedented numbers of employees connecting to corporate networks from home – has provided cybercriminals with the perfect opportunity to try to exploit the vulnerabilities of corporate information systems in order to gain access to them. The resulting four-fold increase in cyberattacks between 2019 and 2020 has forced companies to take a long, hard look at the communication tools they are using, including messaging platforms.

With these platforms under so much scrutiny, attention has been turning to other, more secure alternatives. Thales’s Citadel Team is a candidate with solid credentials, which has already been deployed in more than a third of the companies on France’s CAC 40 index. It guarantees users’ identities via their e-mail address, and its encryption system – already in use in almost 30 NATO member countries – provides secured voice calls and instant messaging. These safeguards, in addition to user data being stored in France and neither mined nor sold to third parties, have recently earned Citadel Team the France Cybersecurity 2021 label.

© Thales

There has been much public concern recently about where data from messaging platforms is stored and how it is used. Thales has decided to meet those concerns head-on by partnering with cloud provider and data management specialist OVHcloud. Citadel Team customers’ data is now stored in OVH’s cloud, meaning that the platform can guarantee not only the security and protection of the data, but also its sovereignty, since it is hosted in local and regional datacentres, in full keeping with national legislation. Users know exactly where their data is, and who is looking after it. 

In 2021, however, voice calls and instant messaging are only the tip of the communications iceberg. In order to meet the ever more demanding needs of business users, Citadel Teams is now proposing a series of new functionalities, including audio- and video-conferencing and screen sharing, all of which are secured by the same end-to-end encryption.

And Citadel Team is not stopping there. Previously the preserve of corporate users, the application now has a freemium version available to the general public, who can access all the messaging features on a smartphone or a PC, safe in the knowledge that these communications are secure.

As Pierre-Yves Jolivet, VP for Cyberdefence solutions at Thales, explains: “In joining forces with OVH, we are boosting Citadel Team’s sovereignty offer, and giving our customers the best possible data hosting solution”. Citadel Team can be trusted to keep data safe and secured, and to ensure that, at the end of the day, the end user is in full control.
 

Download our white paper Messaging applications: Data security and management (ercom.fr)