The modern workforce looks a lot different than it did even a decade ago. If employees actually go to a physical office, their workplaces are often defined by open concepts, collaboration and frequent communication. None of this is by accident. Studies consistently show that happy employees are more productive employees, and autonomy and access are two factors that can make employees happy.

Every year we ask executives a series of questions on key topics. This year we chose to focus on communication, security, privacy, and regulation as these have been hot topics in 2018. We asked more than 300 executives from the US and Europe about their views on some key topics.

We started talking about Messaging Layer Security (MLS) last December and we would now like to give an overview of what was discussed during the second MLS interim meeting that was held on 14th and 15th of January 2019 in Mountain View, CA. Wire is a founding member of the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) IETF working group and continues to contribute with ideas and code.

In the past few years, companies have become significantly more interdependent—users share passwords, and systems use backend technologies operated by third parties. So when hackers breach a company’s security, they often gain access to a wider set of services and information than initially expected.

The end of the year marks a good time to reflect on the passed year and the achievements made by the team. 2018 was, in many ways, a landmark year for Wire. From a product perspective we launched Wire Pro, our business product, in early 2018 and later added Wire Red, our unique crisis collaboration tool, to our product line. That in itself was a big milestone for us. We can now see business’ over five continents using our products.

Messaging Layer Security (MLS) is a new end-to-end encrypted protocol that is developed by an IETF workgroup. Wire initiated the idea, along with Mozilla and Cisco, in 2016 with other contributors joining the efforts later: the University of Oxford, Facebook, INRIA, Google, Twitter. MLS’s major goals are to make end-to-end encrypted messaging in (large) groups efficient and more secure and to become an open standard.

Focus on security and privacy has been important for Wire from day one. Over the years we've taken numerous steps to strengthen our technology and sharpen our privacy-by-design approach to our product and business model. This is more relevant than ever with many starting to realize the destructive effects of weak security and lack of privacy on both day-to-day business operations, and our lives as people who trust our most intimate details to various online services.