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Closing the Zero Trust Collaboration Gap in Unified Communications

By Chuck Smith
20-Oct-2025

Zero Trust has become the standard framework for enterprise security. By enforcing strict identity checks, encrypting traffic, and limiting access on a least-privilege basis, organizations reduce the risk of breaches and lateral movement. Adoption is now mainstream: 81% of organizations have fully or partially implemented a Zero Trust model, while the remaining 19% are planning to, according to StrongDM’s recent survey.

Unified Communication (UC) enables seamless collaboration through messaging, video conferencing, and file sharing, but Zero Trust can turn that collaboration experience into a challenge for IT. Encrypted tunnels and segmented networks hide traffic details IT teams rely on to diagnose problems. SaaS applications often bypass traditional monitoring points altogether. When something goes wrong, IT lacks the visibility to pinpoint the cause. To users, this simply looks like frozen meetings, dropped calls, and unresponsive support.

This is the Zero Trust Collaboration Gap—when security improvements undermine the collaboration tools people rely on every day.

Collaboration Is Business Critical

Platforms like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Webex have become essential to daily operations. For many employees, these platforms are the workplace—where meetings happen, projects move forward, and customer interactions take place. Even small disruptions in voice or video quality can stall productivity, frustrate employees, and damage client relationships.

In Zero Trust environments, these UC disruptions become harder to diagnose:

Encrypted traffic hides root cause. With traffic fully encrypted, IT teams lose the ability to see inside packets, making it nearly impossible to distinguish between application, network, or device problems.
Overlay networks complicate troubleshooting. ZTNA, SASE, and VPN tunnels add layers of abstraction that mask where latency or jitter is introduced, leaving NetOps without a clear performance baseline.
SaaS apps bypass monitoring points. Cloud-based UC traffic often flows directly to providers, skipping data centers and traditional monitoring appliances, which leaves IT blind to performance issues.
Remote work increases variability. Employees connect from home, hotels, or coffee shops, each using different ISPs and Internet paths. That unpredictability makes reproducing and diagnosing UC issues far more complex.

The outcome is familiar: increased mean time to resolution (MTTR), finger-pointing between application, network, and security teams, and frustrated users who lose confidence in IT.

Why User Experience Matters

Zero Trust isn’t only about security; it’s about enabling modern work. Employees need to collaborate seamlessly from anywhere, and customers expect uninterrupted digital engagement. If security controls interfere with productivity, leaders won’t view Zero Trust as a success.

This is why validating the user experience is just as important as enforcing policy. Security teams may be confident that Zero Trust controls are working as designed, but if Zoom calls are choppy or WebEx meetings freeze, the business won’t see the value.

Enterprises need a way to maintain UC and SaaS performance in encrypted, segmented environments without weakening the protections Zero Trust provides.

How Riverbed NPM+ Closes the Gap

Riverbed NPM+ is designed to work in Zero Trust environments. By capturing traffic before encryption at the endpoint, NPM+ restores visibility without breaking security.

With NPM+ and its UC Module, IT teams can:

Measure real user experience. Unlike synthetic tests or aggregate network stats, NPM+ captures actual voice and video quality metrics at the endpoint — for Teams, Zoom, Webex, and other collaboration tools. This means IT sees what users experience in real time, not an approximation.
Diagnose across encrypted paths. Zero Trust tunnels, overlays, and SaaS traffic often obscure root cause. NPM+ isolates whether performance issues stem from the application itself, the user’s device, or the network path, even when traffic never passes through the data center.
Reduce escalations. Armed with definitive endpoint-level data, IT can quickly prove where the issue lies. This ends finger-pointing between teams, reduces time wasted in war rooms, and accelerates mean time to resolution.

Because NPM+ is delivered through the Riverbed Unified Agent, teams avoid the complexity of multiple agents. One lightweight footprint supports Digital Experience, network, and acceleration modules, including all NPM+ modules, scales to thousands of endpoints, and can be managed centrally.

The result: IT Ops has the clarity to support collaboration in Zero Trust environments, and employees have the seamless experience they expect.

Business Benefits

Solving the Zero Trust collaboration gap isn’t just about reducing IT headaches—it directly impacts how employees work, how leaders make decisions, and how the business performs. By restoring visibility into UC and collaboration tools, Riverbed NPM+ delivers clear advantages:

Faster resolution. IT identifies and fixes UC performance problems at the source, even when traffic is encrypted or segmented. This reduces MTTR, minimizes downtime, and ensures users stay productive.
Consistent productivity. Collaboration tools like Teams, Zoom, and Webex remain smooth and reliable. Employees spend less time dealing with frozen calls or dropped meetings, and more time engaging customers, partners, and colleagues.
Stronger executive confidence. With clear evidence that Zero Trust strengthens protection without compromising performance, IT leaders demonstrate value to executives, auditors, and regulators. This builds trust that Zero Trust is supporting – not hindering – the business.
Lower support costs. By giving IT teams definitive data at the endpoint, NPM+ reduces escalations, avoids unnecessary finger-pointing, and cuts the volume of help desk tickets. Fewer war-room calls mean more efficient IT operations and cost savings.

Zero Trust doesn’t have to force a choice between security and collaboration. With Riverbed NPM+, enterprises can achieve both—protecting the business while ensuring seamless employee experiences.

Security and Collaboration Together

Zero Trust is essential for protecting modern enterprises. But stronger security that undermines productivity is not success.

Riverbed NPM+ and the UC Module ensure organizations can adopt Zero Trust with confidence, maintaining both security and collaboration. By validating the network experience across encrypted, segmented, and remote environments, NPM+ helps IT deliver the outcomes business leaders expect.

Because Zero Trust isn’t just about keeping threats out. It’s also about keeping the business moving.