European Workers Trust Their Collaboration Tools. The Numbers Tell a Different Story.

Key points

• 84% of IT professionals surveyed across the UK, France and Germany said they were confident in the security of their collaboration tools, according to Wire's 2025 report.
• Only 29% of those same respondents said their collaboration tools were fully suitable for handling sensitive communications.
• 61% of organisations reported that access to shared files often stayed active longer than it should.
• Fewer than one in three organisations (28%) used a purpose-built secure tool when sharing information with outside partners.
• 34% of respondents said they could not easily determine who inside their organisation had access to sensitive files.

Confidence is not the same as safety. That gap sits at the centre of a new survey from Wire, a business communications provider, which polled IT professionals across the UK, France and Germany about how their organisations share information at work.

The headline figure sounds reassuring: 84% of respondents said they were confident their collaboration environment was secure. Read further, though, and the picture changes fast.

Just 29% said their tools were fully suitable for handling sensitive material. Sixty-one percent said access to shared files routinely stayed switched on longer than needed, and 19% found it very difficult to revoke that access once granted. Wire's own summary described this as "significant tension" between confidence and reality.

Why does it matter which apps your team uses?

Not every app treats your data the same way, and organisations have little control over tools they didn't officially approve.

Wire found that most organisations run several tool types at once: corporate messaging platforms, email, cloud file-storage services such as OneDrive and Dropbox, and consumer apps such as WhatsApp and Signal. Few separate these by how sensitive the information is. A chat about project timelines and a message containing client medical records might travel through the same channel.

The problem sharpens when outside partners are involved. Three-quarters of organisations used the same email set-up for external partners as they did internally. Only 28% used a dedicated secure channel for those outside conversations. External partners, Wire noted, "may not follow the same policies, use the same systems or retain information in the same way." A separate figure underlines the anxiety: 33% of respondents said they lacked confidence in their ability to retain control over files once shared externally.

Then there's shadow IT: employees using personal or consumer apps for official work, outside the IT department's view. This happens most often when something is urgent, when a partner doesn't use the same approved tools, or when the official option feels too complicated. Wire's chief executive, Benjamin Schilz, told Dark Reading the official tools are often properly secured in a technical sense, but that answer is "incomplete" because it ignores everything happening outside them.

For context, our June report on the Tchap account takeover that exposed 73,000 French government users showed what happens when governance assumptions collide with user behaviour: the platform itself wasn't broken, but the controls around it were.

If you've ever sent a work document through a personal WhatsApp group because it was faster, your organisation's security team almost certainly cannot see that file or control who still has it.

Wire recommended moving toward "end-to-end governance," meaning auditable controls covering both internal teams and outside collaborators, not just the approved tool list. Schilz explained the structural problem: enterprise collaboration platforms grew as collections of separate tools built mainly for internal use. Bolting external access onto them creates friction, friction pushes employees toward easier unsanctioned alternatives, and those alternatives create risk.

Should you worry?

If your organisation uses a mix of email, consumer messaging and shared drives without clear rules about which carries which type of information, the answer is yes. Wire's maturity assessment placed most surveyed organisations in the middle of the scale: using enterprise tools internally but inconsistent about everything else. The policy foundation exists in many cases. What's missing is demonstrable control over what actually flows through it.