I felt this was new and interesting-enough Zoom news to post and hadn’t seen it here yet.
I received the following email 2 days ago, because I have a paid Zoom membership. This new feature, which becomes available on Saturday April 18th is not offered on the free service. We use Zoom frequently for our small business and I chose to begin paying for it, partly because I do occasionally need more than 3 people on a call and/or 40 minutes for that call, and partly because we wanted to support the company we find quite useful (and partly own).
You may recall that a piece of the Zoom-bashing of late was a scandal around some data being routed through Chinese data centers and concerns about whether that data was secure. It appears this is Zoom’s response to that concern.
Email text follows:
Dear Valued Customer,
Zoom leverages a robust global network to support our users no matter where they are located, natively routing traffic through the meeting zone that will provide the best performance.
Beginning April 18th, you as a paid customer, will be able to customize which data center regions your account can use, by opting in or out of a specific data center region for real-time meeting data in transit. Zoom admins and account owners of paid accounts can, at the account, group, or user level:
- Opt out of specific data center regions
- Opt in to specific data center regions
Please visit your web portal after April 18th to set your preferences. (See screenshot below).
<The screenshot, which I couldn’t duplicate here, shows brief instructions on how one can click check-boxes to turn on or off radio buttons, corresponding to data centers in the following regions:>
__ Australia
__ Canada
__ China
__ Europe
__ India
__ Japan / Hong Kong
__ Latin America
__ United States
This feature gives you more control over your data and your interaction with our global network when using Zoom’s industry-leading video communication services.
Please note, that you will not be able to change or opt out of your default region, which will be locked. The default region is the region where your account is provisioned. For the majority of our customers, this is the United States.
Interesting, I thought, and a feature I suspect many businesses will be happy about. Especially the ability to toggle the “China” button. Now, whether it truly reroutes things as advertised I suppose one has to take on faith.
BC
Long Zoom and most other Saul companies, among a smattering of others.