This is part of a series on the evolution of the Cisco Collaboration Cloud platform, exploring the technical and design principles behind its unique architecture.

So far in this series, we've learned about two ways the Cisco Collaboration Cloud is revolutionizing enterprise communications technology:  through its exceptional user experience and its hybrid capability. A third is security. Security ensures our customers are always in control of their own data and is fundamental to everything we do.

For IT, the question you really need to ask is a simple one: Does the collaboration platform protect my content from the prying eyes of others, including the vendor, or doesn't it?

There is no gray area for collaboration security.

Our on-premises products, such as Cisco Unified Communications Manager, have traditionally put the decision about whether to use "Secure Mode" into the hands of the administrator. Secure Mode controls device profile security and media encryption. With entirely on-premises technology, administrators could decide whether the effort required to enable Secure Mode was justified for their enterprise.

More often than not, administrators decided to leave Secure Mode turned off. Let's be clear: the administrator's decision not toenablesecurity was a failure on our part. We presented the administrator with an option to choose security that was only as secure as their network perimeter, which required zero effort or expense.

As the network perimeter continues to lose its definition, this is no longer the right approach to collaboration security. For entirely on-premises collaboration, a very long tail of existing deployments makes moving to Secure Mode a lengthy journey. Although that journey is underway, the spirit of revolution has led us to the cloud.

The fantastic thing about revolutionizing enterprise communications through the cloud is we get to start from scratch -with security from day one. End-to-end encryption, announced at last year's Cisco Collaboration Summit, was just the start. Today, we can:

• Fix the broken model of trading security for administrative overhead, experience, scale, or performance.
• Design the platform so that administrators don't need to spend time or money enabling security.
• Ensure that users have an amazingandsecure experience.
• Make a platform that is flexibleand
• Restore faith in the cloud for even our most paranoid customers.
• Dictate that transport layer encryption (TLS) is not sufficient.

Security is a first-class, always-on, baseline requirement, not an option. We have set an extraordinarily high bar for enterprise collaboration security. And we did so without wavering on our commitments to experience, flexibility, performance, or scale. The Cisco Collaboration Cloud is the most secure enterprise collaboration solution available, and we've secured it without compromise.

Next week, at the Cisco Collaboration Summit, we will share all the details of how we have achieved this feat. Please join us for the keynote to hear from SVP Rowan Trollope and Collaboration CTO Jonathan Rosenberg. Register today and watch on December 8 at 9:00 a.m. PST.