Slack Technologies Inc. today announced a set of new and upcoming security features to help enterprises protect data that employees share in chat channels.

Slack’s main competitor in the enterprise market is Microsoft Corp’s Microsoft Teams. Today’s update will enable it to compete better with the security features offered by Teams in a number of areas, including encryption and security analytics.

Last year, Slack added the option for privacy-conscious organizations to protect data shared in internal chat channels using their own cryptographic keys to gain increased control. The team chat provider plans to expand that capability significantly. According to Slack, it’s working to let companies encrypt not just internal channels with their own keys but also Slack Connect channels through which they communicate with external organizations such as suppliers.

Companies will also gain the ability to use custom keys with Slack’s Workflow Builder tool. Workflow Builder is used, among others, to automate the collection of information like employee feedback and help desk requests, information that some organizations may wish to encrypt to avoid data leaks.

Sensitive records often come with other requirements besides encryption, such as data residency. That means certain records need to be stored in the region where they’re created to comply with regulations or internal policies, a need Slack is addressing as well today. It’s adding Canada to the list of countries where an enterprise can choose to store employees’ chat messages and will introduce the ability for customers to choose where their encryption keys are stored.

For organizations such as banks, Slack will roll out an “information barrier” feature for limiting communications between departments or users. Slack sees this capability lending itself to tasks such as meeting industry-specific regulations. A financial institution, for example, could prevent employees at its stock trading and investment banking groups from communicating with one another via Slack.

Capping off the platform updates is a pair of new integrations. Slack will add the ability to export activity logs to Splunk Inc.’s popular analytics and security platform, which companies can use to look for potential breach indicators. Administrators will gain access to an integration with Microsoft’s Intune tool that will give them the ability to delete work-related files on an employee device if it’s lost or stolen.

Photo: Slack