Slack Technologies Inc. is expanding its cybersecurity capabilities in a bid to win more enterprise customers.

The team chat provider today launched Slack EKM, a new tool that will enable companies to encrypt employee correspondence using their own cryptographic keys.

Slack already encrypts the data that goes through its messaging platform, but large organizations often require the ability to manage the process themselves. This is an especially common demand among companies in regulated industries such as banking that work with sensitive records.

Slack EKM is built atop Amazon Web Services Inc.’s AWS EKS key management service. Besides sparing its engineers the hassle of building an entire product from scratch, Slack’s decision to base the tool on AWS EKS may make it more appealing to potential buyers. The kind of risk-averse enterprises that prefer managing their own cryptographic keys are more likely to trust a tool with time-tested capabilities than a brand-new, unproven offering.

Companies can use Slack EKM to regulate in a granular fashion what data employees share internally. The tool provides the ability to block users and chat channels if sensitive information is being mishandled, as well as pull specific messages or files when a more pinpointed approach is required.

This fine-grained control is designed to let companies fix data leaks without disrupting internal communications. If an employee from, say, the accounting department accidentally posts a financial spreadsheet to the channel of another business unit, administrators can pull the file without shutting down the entire channel. Slack EKM even makes it possible to control the time of day when access is revoked to streamline the process further.

The tool doubles as a monitoring mechanism for keeping watch on data usage. Administrators can check where and how messages are accessed in Slack, as well as view related information such as whether a user posts content from a device with an unknown IP address.

Slack EKM is available an extension for Slack Enterprise Grid Enterprise, the version of the team chat service for large organizations. It include specialized features such as the ability to create channels that span multiple departments and invite employees from a company’s corporate partners. 

Photo: Scott Schiller/Flickr