Zooming into zoom’s zip files- decoding colossal profit figures

Zoom is an American communications company that was established in the year 2011 commonly used for video communication. Generally, when someone talks about video chat, the first source that comes to mind is Skype. Nevertheless, it has been used for formal purposes for many years but one company that has caught stronghold of ‘clickbait’.

As soon as the world entered lockdown mode due to COVID-19, all organisations switched to ‘Work from Home’ and started conducting conferences and meetings online. Educational institutions as well started conducting scheduled online classes. In such a scenario, online video conferencing apps have seen an overnight spike in demand. The one app that has been reigning in this sphere is the ZOOM app.

Many features make the app user- friendly and suitable for all day long work. You can host meetings, join and schedule meetings just with the help of a User ID and password. You can send the meeting link to those whom you want to invite to the virtual discussion session. At least 95% of the worldwide population must have been to one zoom meeting in these months.

Now, moving on from the congeniality of the application, let’s take a look at how controversial the app has been as we zoom into it’s working processes.

Along with being user- friendly, the app has also been alleged to breach privacy and personal space of the user. The news of a lot of valuable data being leaked in the market surfaced on all platforms which claimed that confidential information about many MNCs was sold in black markets to earn more than what was being received via legal service providers.

The issues started rising during the month of April when several cases of malware were detected in the app, and security had been breached by worldwide hackers and agents of cybercrime.

A tutor based in Delhi had filed a plea in the Supreme Court on May 22 seeking ban on the app and stop its usage for official and educational purposes. The court asked for legitimate data from the center and the company to have an insight into what has been going on and why hasn’t the cyber cell reacted on it yet.

The petitioner claimed that zoom was responsible for data and cyber hoarding. Calls are not ended to end encrypted, which is why the participants are wary of losing essential information. The company has also been alleged to route traffic via China whose government keeps a keen eye on even a tad bit piece of data flowing from one place to another. the system was said to be vulnerable due to a Chinese malware controlling the functioning of the video conferencing app.

The authorities of the company took the responsibility and said that due to some glitch and shortcomings on the company’s side, this happened and it wouldn’t be repeated in the future.

After a church from San Francisco charged the company of information being hacked, Zoom started taking things seriously. By adding support for AES 256-bit GCM encryption, Zoom will provide increased protection for meeting data and develop resistance against cybercrime. Earlier in the month of May, Zoom also acquired a modified key base which helped it to develop better end to end encrypted conversations.

Raining profits

Zoom proved that a cliche video chat making app could do wonders by taking the right steps during the right time. The company’s projected and actual profits took leaps and bounds with the start of COVID-19. The earnings were 20% of shares- adjusted, and currently, the revenue is $ 328.2 million.

The experts said that they hadn’t seen such surge into actual revenue figures for a long, long time now. Zoom’s mobile app had 173 million monthly active users as of May 27, up from 14 million on March 4, citing data from app-analytics company Apptopia which means that this is the estimated figure, the real ones are huge.

Zoom has also paid extra bonuses to its employees to help them get away with their expenses in these trying and testing times when maximum companies are cutting their payload using zoom only as their source/medium of communication.

Zoom is expecting to generate around $1.8 billion during this fiscal year which is three times more than what it had projected in its last fiscal year. The figures can vary, and most probably go up. Sales in the current quarter have been estimated to be $500 million. Zoom’s revenue grew 169% this quarter and is expected to surge in the next and the fore coming ones looking at the lockdown mode not going off for a while.

The reason behind Zoom not getting banned in any portion of the world despite so many allegations and complaints is the fact that people need this tool to facilitate their daily work and whatever problem is being put forth by the customers is being catered quickly, although many issues still persist.

In India, an app named Namaste is in talks to take over most of the virtual chat and video applications that might lead to a breach of information on the domestic user’s side. For example, google hangout and zoom will be overpowered by this app. if the talks are in play, it would be a good step towards information security and cyber growth in India.