Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for inviting Zoom to participate in this important hearing today.
I firmly believe that the role you play and your decisions on how best to proceed with Parliament in these extraordinary times are truly significant. Ensuring that the House of Commons continues to be productive and operational is more important than ever.
We at Zoom are committed to helping support your efforts and to providing any information you need in advance of your presentation to Parliament on May 15. With millions of people around the world working from home due to COVID-19, video communication companies like Zoom are playing an integral role in ensuring that businesses, hospitals, schools and, importantly, government can continue to collaborate securely and remain operational.
Zoom recognized early on that we were uniquely positioned to help in this time of need, and we felt compelled to act. We feel a tremendous responsibility to our users. In February, we committed to doing everything in our power to support those impacted by COVID-19, and that promise very much continues to date.
By way of background, I have over 40 years of technology experience, most recently as the CIO for KPMG U.S. and the CIO for Blackstone. In December 2017, I retired, and shortly afterwards Zoom invited me to join them as their global CIO. Once I met Eric Yuan, our CEO and founder, and conferred with industry veterans and my peers, I was inspired to join his elite team. Eric, who had 14 years of experience building Webex, and a team of engineers founded Zoom in the U.S. almost 10 years ago, in their mission to build a seamless and frictionless video-first communications platform based on four principles: security, reliability, functionality and cost-effectiveness for their customers.
There were several objectives, most notably the seamless and frictionless experience, intuitive ease of use, the elimination of the “meeting tax”, and doing this agnostically across platforms to enable the energy of the participants to be focused on the substance and not the logistics and operations of the meeting.
Today, Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications. Zoom's sole focus is providing a secure, reliable platform that works seamlessly across devices and is incredibly easy to use. We are proud of what we have accomplished with our users, from individual subscribers to the world's largest global enterprises, which is reflected in our customer satisfaction in the 90-plus percentile.
There is a reason people say, “Zoom, it just works.” In light of COVID-19, usage of Zoom has ballooned in recent months. We have grown from 10 million daily meeting participants as of December 2019, to over 300 million per day in April, with incredible service reliability. We are proud to be doing our part to keep people connected and organizations working during the pandemic.
As part of this effort, we opened up the platform to new types of users, such as offering free video conferencing to primary and secondary schools around the world. To date, over 100,000 schools in 25 countries have used Zoom's free services to stay connected to their students during this pandemic. We have also served numerous government customers for years, and in the current environment, with COVID-19, our service has become more essential than ever to ensure that governments around the world can continue to function during the difficult days ahead.
For example, in the U.K., we are proud to be helping MPs fulfill their parliamentary duties. They have successfully rolled out a hybrid Parliament with a maximum of 50 lawmakers physically in the debating chamber and another 120 permitted to join via Zoom.
In Canada, we are humbled to have been selected to support the House of Commons. We have worked very closely with Soufiane Ben Moussa, the CTO of the House of Commons, to ensure that we are providing Zoom's trademark ease of use coupled with training on Zoom's leading security features, as well as technical support to meet specifications such as enabling simultaneous channels for English and French.
We have always been a leader in innovating at speed and scale, and are equally committed to doing that with respect to privacy and security. In its current form, Zoom unequivocally delivers a safe and secure virtual meeting environment when used with the appropriate safeguards to protect meetings. As sophisticated organizations across the globe do exhaustive security reviews of our user network and data centre layers, they continue to confidently select Zoom for complete deployment. In fact, we have seen a surge in this regard recently.
To echo the words of our CEO, our chief concern is ensuring that the safety, privacy and security of our platform is worthy of the trust our users have put in us. As such, and in light of new use cases and public attention on Zoom, we have made a number of changes across the platform. We have wasted no time in executing the 90-day plan we announced on April 1 to better identify, address and fix issues proactively. A summary of our plan, including all of the actions we committed to, can be found in the briefing materials we submitted.
A couple of examples include that we enacted a feature freeze and shifted all of our engineering resources to focus on trust, safety, security and privacy. We also launched an industry agnostic CISO council, in partnership with leading CISOs, to facilitate an ongoing dialogue regarding security and privacy best practices.
Most recently, we announced robust security enhancements with the general availability of Zoom 5.0, which, among other key features, adds support for AES-256 GCM encryption across Zoom's infrastructure. This increased level of encryption enables Zoom to provide industry-leading protection for meeting data and resistance against tampering and unauthorized access. Zoom's security features, which have previously been accessed throughout the meeting menus, are now at hosts' fingertips. They are grouped together and easily found by clicking the security icon in the meeting menu bar on the host's interface.
With regard to data routing there are several facts that I would like to share. The Zoom platform only collects information necessary to provide the service. Where all meeting participants are using the Zoom client, all meeting data—audio, video and content—is fully encrypted among all participants, and it is never encrypted until it reaches a participant's device, including its transit through our data centres. There are exceptions to this, such as a participant joining via a phone line, a cloud recording or other features—for example, streaming to YouTube without encryption being enabled.
Zoom has 17 data centres around the world, one in Toronto and one in Vancouver. We supplement our data centres with cloud providers, which, among other things, are used for authentication, cloud recordings and metrics.
We also understand there are concerns and sensitivities around data travelling to certain countries. We maintain geofencing around China specifically, ensuring that users outside of China do not have their meeting data routed through China. We are aware of recent reports suggesting that a small fraction of non-China meetings were inadvertently routed through Chinese servers. Zoom investigated this issue and has ensured that it will never happen again.
To provide additional comfort and control for our users, we recently added a feature that enables paid Zoom customers to customize which data centre regions their account can use for real-time meeting traffic. We also enhanced the Zoom administration dashboard to show additional transparency on data routing.
With respect to privacy, Zoom does not and has never sold user data; does not monitor meetings or their contents; and complies with all applicable privacy laws, rules and regulations in the jurisdictions within which it operates. Zoom has fully implemented compliance programs designed to meet the requirements of the Canadian data protection regulations, including the Personal Information Protection and Electronics Document Act.
