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. But read further into the findings 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. Nineteen percent found it very difficult to take that access away after granting it. Wire's own summary called this "significant tension" between confidence and reality.

Why does it matter which apps your team uses?

It matters because not every app treats your data the same way, and organisations have little control over tools they did not officially approve.

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

This gets worse 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. Wire noted this matters because external partners "may not follow the same policies, use the same systems or retain information in the same way."

Then there is what security professionals call shadow IT: employees using personal or consumer apps for official work, outside the visibility of the IT department. Wire found this happens most often when something is urgent, when a partner does not use the same approved tools, or when the official option feels too complicated. Wire's chief executive, Benjamin Schilz, put it plainly: the official tools are often properly secured in a technical sense, but that answer is "incomplete" because it ignores everything happening outside those tools.

For ordinary employees, the practical lesson is straightforward. If you have 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 that organisations move toward what it called "end-to-end governance," meaning clear rules and auditable controls that cover both internal teams and outside collaborators, not just the approved tool list.

Schilz described the core engineering problem concisely: enterprise collaboration platforms grew up as collections of separate tools built mainly for internal use. Bolting external access onto them creates friction, which pushes employees toward easier, unsanctioned alternatives, which creates risk.