Prevent Corporate Espionage: Keep Calls and Messages Secure and Private

This is a guest blog post by Roger Arroyo, Vice President of International Sales at Portable Communications Inc. Roger is an accomplished sales and business development professional with 20+ years of telecommunication experience. Roger is innovative and profit-oriented with demonstrated success in increasing revenues, achieving cost reduction, and improving customer satisfaction directly in customer-facing operations and indirectly through channel partners. Roger has proven expertise in management and implementation of complex telecommunication integrations. Roger is recognized in the industry for his talent in analyzing competitive landscapes, conducting research, and aligning product offerings with customer requirements, translating into lower product development and implementation costs.

Corporate espionage is a huge concern within the hospitality industry. It’s a tough business and in order to get ahead of competitors, or remain ahead, it’s critical to create competitive advantage. Unfortunately competitive advantage is sometimes achieved by unscrupulous means and therefore securing information – including marketing promotions, sales strategies, campaigns, expansion plans and others is critical.

The following use case illustrates the loss of revenue and opportunity in the Hospitality market due to unauthorized access of confidential and proprietary information through access to insecure mobile calls and messages.

The Challenge: Corporate Espionage in a Large Resort Chain

Imagine we spent weeks planning and developing an exciting marketing campaign. We were offering a one of a kind promotion and had dedicated many weeks building out the ad campaign, new pages for our website, promotional catalogues and other marketing materials. We were days from the big launch, when unexpectedly our biggest competitor launched an almost identical campaign. The result was a devastating loss to our company – financial as well as emotional.

We were surprised and shocked. The hospitality industry is a highly competitive market, where competitors are constantly looking for an edge on one another. The chance of two competitors launching identical campaigns is possible, although highly unlikely.

After an investigation, we uncovered that the competitor had unauthorized access to all our executive’s mobile phone conversations – calls between mobile phones or calls between desktop phones within the resort headquarters and the executive’s mobile phones were compromised. Our competitor either acquired it through a third party targeting enterprises or had access to the local carrier’s network, allowing them to retrieve all of our conversations and messages. They had access to our marketing plans – including the specific campaign details, information on promotional materials, launch date and all other related information. The data enabled them to design their own similar campaign days ahead of ours – beating us to market and severely damaging our position as a market leader.

The Solution: Securing Calls and Messages with TrustCall

Recognizing the security gap, we immediately began searching for a means of securing all mobile communications – including phone calls and text messages. Critical features we identified included:

• Securing calls between mobile phones, as well as calls between mobile and office phones
• Business-grade features including APIs for integration with our internal systems
• Compatibility with our Mobile Device Management (MDM) Software
• 24-7 support, ensuring secure communications are always available
• Global coverage – the solution must be supported globally – so that it can be utilized across the entire chain of resorts around the world

After evaluating mobile and landline encryption alternatives, we found TrustCall to meet all of our requirements. We implemented the solution globally across our chain of resorts for our executives to securely communicate from any location.

The quality of the solution is excellent – it just works; executives can hear each other clearly from any of our resorts, even when there’s low bandwidth. And the support team walked us through the deployment ensuring a seamless transition. Our next major marketing campaign is about to launch and we are comfortable knowing that no one will compromise our mobile devices and conversations until it launches to the public.