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Introduction: Trust Is Not the Same as Security
As businesses across Europe continue embracing hybrid work, cloud collaboration, and digital communication, the attack surface available to cybercriminals has expanded dramatically. Employees exchange sensitive documents through messaging platforms, cloud storage services, video conferencing applications, and email every day, often without considering whether these channels were designed to protect confidential information.
A new industry survey suggests that while European organizations believe their collaboration environments are secure, reality tells a very different story. Security confidence remains high among IT leaders, yet practical weaknesses in governance, access management, and external collaboration continue to expose organizations to unnecessary cyber risks.
The report highlights a growing disconnect between perception and operational security. This confidence gap could become one of the most overlooked cybersecurity challenges facing enterprises in 2026.
Survey Reveals High Confidence Among European Security Leaders
Wire, a communications and secure collaboration provider, surveyed IT professionals across the United Kingdom, France, and Germany to understand how organizations protect collaboration platforms.
The results initially appear encouraging.
Around 84% of IT professionals expressed confidence in the security of their collaboration environments. Additionally, 79% believed they maintained effective control over access to collaboration data.
On paper, these numbers suggest mature cybersecurity programs capable of protecting modern digital workplaces.
However, a closer examination of the survey paints a far less reassuring picture.
Reality Tells a Different Story
Despite overwhelming confidence, only 29% of respondents believed their collaboration tools were fully suitable for handling highly sensitive communications.
The survey uncovered several concerning weaknesses:
61% admitted shared file access frequently remains active longer than necessary.
34% struggle to identify exactly who has permission to access sensitive corporate files.
19% reported significant difficulty revoking access once permissions had been granted.
These findings reveal that organizations often lose visibility over sensitive information after it begins moving across collaboration platforms.
Security becomes increasingly difficult when organizations cannot accurately answer a basic question:
Who currently has access to confidential business information?
Confidence and Operational Security Are Not the Same
Wire concluded that European organizations are not necessarily careless.
Instead, they suffer from a dangerous imbalance between confidence and measurable security controls.
Many IT departments assume their collaboration platforms are secure because they use enterprise-grade products managed under corporate security policies.
While technically accurate, this assumption overlooks how employees actually work.
Modern collaboration extends far beyond officially approved software.
Employees frequently communicate through consumer messaging applications, personal cloud storage, external email accounts, and third-party file-sharing services that operate outside traditional IT governance.
Organizations Depend on Multiple Collaboration Platforms
Today’s enterprise rarely relies on a single communication platform.
Instead, businesses simultaneously use:
Enterprise messaging systems
Corporate email
Cloud storage services like Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox
Team collaboration platforms
Consumer messaging applications including WhatsApp and Signal
Rather than separating sensitive communications according to risk level, many organizations mix all of these platforms into a single workflow.
The result is fragmented security.
Sensitive documents may travel through highly secure enterprise systems one moment before appearing inside consumer applications the next.
External Collaboration Introduces Greater Risk
Internal collaboration generally benefits from corporate security policies.
External collaboration does not.
The survey found that:
Three-quarters of organizations use the same corporate email platform when communicating externally.
45% exchange files through shared links.
42% rely on messaging applications when working with outside organizations.
Only 28% use dedicated secure collaboration tools designed specifically for external communication.
This creates significant security challenges because suppliers, contractors, consultants, and business partners rarely follow identical cybersecurity standards.
Once sensitive information leaves organizational boundaries, maintaining control becomes much more difficult.
Unsurprisingly, one-third of organizations admitted they lack confidence in controlling externally shared files.
Shadow IT Continues to Grow
Perhaps the most concerning finding involves Shadow IT.
Employees increasingly bypass official collaboration tools in favor of personal applications that offer greater convenience.
Common examples include:
Personal Dropbox accounts
Consumer messaging apps
Personal cloud storage
Private file-sharing services
These unofficial platforms become attractive whenever:
Work is urgent.
Approved tools feel too slow.
External partners use different software.
Employees work remotely.
Mobile devices limit official application functionality.
Although these decisions often improve productivity, they dramatically increase organizational cyber risk.
Shadow IT creates blind spots where security teams lose visibility into how sensitive information moves throughout the enterprise.
Why Security Leaders Misjudge Their Environment
According to Wire CEO Benjamin Schilz, security leaders often evaluate collaboration security using three simple criteria:
Enterprise Platforms Are Approved
Organizations verify that collaboration software has been officially sanctioned.
IT Governance Exists
Security teams confirm platforms fall under IT management.
Corporate Security Controls Are Active
Standard protections such as authentication, encryption, endpoint security, and monitoring are enabled.
While all three conditions may be true, they ignore one important reality.
Employees regularly operate outside those controlled environments.
As a result, technical security may appear strong while actual operational security steadily weakens.
Most Organizations Remain in the Middle of Security Maturity
Wire believes most European organizations occupy the middle tier of collaboration security maturity.
These organizations typically:
Use enterprise collaboration internally.
Apply inconsistent controls externally.
Rely heavily on email.
Permit widespread use of consumer applications.
Have incomplete governance over shared information.
More mature organizations demonstrate several additional characteristics.
They:
Understand regulatory compliance requirements.
Segment collaboration tools based on data sensitivity.
Maintain stronger oversight over external users.
Continuously monitor collaboration workflows.
Integrate policy enforcement with operational controls.
Even these organizations, however, still struggle to fully connect policy with real-world employee behavior.
Secure-by-Design Must Become the New Standard
Wire argues that organizations entering 2026 should embrace a Secure-by-Design philosophy.
Rather than securing only individual applications, businesses should secure the entire collaboration lifecycle.
This includes:
Internal communication
External collaboration
Identity management
Access governance
Compliance auditing
File lifecycle monitoring
Permission reviews
Continuous visibility
Security should remain active from the moment information is created until its permanent deletion.
Fragmented Platforms Create Administrative Complexity
One major challenge lies in the design of enterprise collaboration ecosystems.
Most organizations have accumulated collaboration tools gradually over many years.
Email, cloud drives, conferencing software, instant messaging platforms, document management systems, and identity services all evolved independently.
This fragmented architecture complicates permission management.
Access frequently becomes either overly restrictive or excessively permissive.
Granular external collaboration often requires complicated manual administration.
When employees encounter this friction, many simply bypass official processes altogether.
Unfortunately, convenience frequently wins over security.
Deep Analysis
Detect External Sharing in Microsoft 365 (PowerShell)
Connect-ExchangeOnline Get-Mailbox | Get-MailboxPermission List Anonymous Share Links (SharePoint Online)
Connect-SPOService -Url https://tenant-admin.sharepoint.com Get-SPOSite
Audit Azure AD Sign-In Logs
Get-AzureADAuditSignInLogs
Review File Permissions on Linux
find /shared -type f -exec ls -l {} \;
Search for Publicly Accessible Files
find /srv/data -perm -o+r
Monitor Network Connections
ss -tunap
Detect Unauthorized Cloud Applications
az ad app list
Audit User Sessions
who last
Review Active SMB Shares
Get-SmbShare Sample SIEM Query (Microsoft Sentinel KQL) kql AuditLogs | where OperationName contains "Add member" | summarize count() by InitiatedBy
These administrative commands help security teams identify excessive permissions, monitor collaboration activity, detect unauthorized access, and strengthen governance across enterprise collaboration platforms.
What Undercode Say
The most dangerous cybersecurity problems are often invisible, and this survey demonstrates exactly why. Organizations rarely fail because they lack security products. They fail because they misunderstand how employees actually behave.
There is a growing difference between infrastructure security and workflow security. A company may deploy encrypted messaging, multifactor authentication, endpoint protection, and Zero Trust policies, yet still lose control of sensitive information because an employee forwarded a confidential document through a personal messaging application.
This confidence gap should concern executives far more than traditional malware infections. Modern cyberattacks increasingly target collaboration ecosystems rather than technical vulnerabilities. Attackers know employees naturally prioritize productivity over policy, making collaboration platforms attractive entry points.
Shadow IT remains one of the biggest contributors to insider risk. Employees rarely act maliciously when using personal applications. Instead, they seek convenience. Unfortunately, convenience frequently bypasses monitoring, logging, retention policies, and access governance, leaving security teams blind to critical activities.
Another overlooked issue is permission sprawl. Temporary access granted to contractors, vendors, or consultants often becomes permanent because organizations lack automated review processes. Over time, dormant accounts accumulate unnecessary privileges that attackers can exploit.
External collaboration introduces additional complexity because every partner organization operates under different cybersecurity standards. Even if one company enforces strict controls, its suppliers or contractors may not. Sensitive information becomes only as secure as the weakest participant in the collaboration chain.
The survey also highlights an operational challenge rather than a technical one. Most enterprise collaboration environments evolved over years through acquisitions, cloud migrations, and departmental software choices. The result is a fragmented ecosystem where identity, messaging, storage, conferencing, and file sharing are managed independently instead of as a unified security framework.
Artificial intelligence will make this challenge even greater. AI assistants increasingly summarize meetings, access corporate documents, generate reports, and retrieve shared knowledge. If permissions are overly broad, AI systems may unintentionally expose confidential information across departments or external collaborators.
Organizations should move beyond simply asking whether a platform is encrypted or compliant. They should ask whether every employee consistently uses approved workflows and whether every permission can be audited in real time.
Future collaboration security will depend on continuous visibility, behavioral analytics, automated permission reviews, adaptive access policies, and intelligent governance rather than relying solely on traditional security controls.
Security awareness training must also evolve. Instead of teaching employees only how to recognize phishing emails, organizations should educate staff on secure collaboration habits, responsible data sharing, and the risks associated with unofficial communication channels.
The survey ultimately serves as a reminder that confidence is not a measurable security control. Visibility, governance, accountability, and continuous monitoring remain the true foundations of enterprise collaboration security.
✅ Verified: The survey findings consistently show a significant gap between IT leaders’ confidence and the actual governance of collaboration environments, particularly regarding access control and sensitive data handling.
✅ Verified: The widespread use of consumer messaging apps and other Shadow IT solutions is a well-documented cybersecurity challenge that increases organizational risk and complicates compliance efforts.
✅ Verified: Security experts broadly support adopting Secure-by-Design principles, stronger access governance, and continuous monitoring to improve collaboration security, making the report’s recommendations consistent with current cybersecurity best practices.
Prediction
(+1) Organizations that adopt unified collaboration governance, automated access reviews, Zero Trust architecture, and AI-assisted security monitoring will significantly reduce insider risk while improving regulatory compliance and operational efficiency over the next few years.
(-1) Organizations that continue relying on fragmented collaboration platforms and tolerate widespread Shadow IT usage are likely to experience more data exposure incidents, compliance violations, insider threats, and supply chain compromises as attackers increasingly target collaboration ecosystems instead of traditional network infrastructure.
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