Among large enterprises, security is of preeminent importance for virtually every type and aspect of internal and external communications. Since security is oftentimes about controlling access, it is not surprising that some of the most rigorous security requirements we see related
to registration & authentication capabilities. Consistently, conversations with our clients highlight the importance of our secure, multifaceted event registration capabilities for broadcasts to internal (employee) and external audiences.
For example, one of our clients is responsible for running internal events for their employees, as well as managing high visibility communications to customers, investors, suppliers, and other stakeholders. The client mentioned that they had been approached by one of our competitors and were able to very quickly rule out their solution based on the limited secure registration models they offered. The client used Broadcaster to secure their event registration via the following multi-layer process:
1. Employees sign into the Broadcaster event which is integrated with the client’s single sign on (SSO) service. The viewer is sent over to the client-hosted employee directory, authenticated against that directory, and then sent back into the Broadcaster event as an authenticated user. If the viewer is sent to the client directory and hasn’t already signed in for the day, they will be asked for their sign-on credentials and go through the two-factor authentication process (if 2FA is required on the client side) and then passed back to Broadcaster as an authenticated user. This is all standard SSO that is expected from all enterprise applications in the current world to ensure that the viewer is a current employee of the company.
2. Adding another layer to control access to sensitive or proprietary information in the Broadcaster event, the client also adds an Access Control List to the event, which further restricts who can get into the event to a list of specific email addresses or a specific set of email domains. For events that offer registration, versus SSO, the client also adds Broadcaster’s Email Verification option whereby Broadcaster emails an individual, one-time use link to the registrant that can’t be shared with other viewers.
While we developed Broadcaster’s various sign on methods and security features based on our customers’ requirements, it’s impressive to hear that for this client, the ability to leverage all of these registration security features is now a mandatory requirement for their webcasts.
Another client, who similarly produces live events with a large contingency of external (and employee) audiences, shared another advantage of our event registration method particularly compared with events they’d hosted in their collaboration systems. This case flips restriction on its head by showing how Broadcaster’s registration urls can easily be shared with colleagues and partners to increase the audience size and enable the producers to collect viewer data for each registrant.
While this may sound obvious, the client compared our Broadcaster workflow to a webcast done on their collaboration platform, where each guest had to be manually invited one at a time and viewer data is scarce (only system log in names are displayed – vs. email – and the organizers are unable to see how long each viewer stayed, their location/OS or device etc.).
It just goes to show that viewer registration is the critical gateway for your live events that determines who gets in and what you know about them.
By Bill Accola, VP of Professional Services & Customer Success, MediaPlatform