Every day, organizations exchange vast amounts of sensitive information. A neighborhood care team coordinating with a healthcare provider, an accountant aligning with a client, an employer consulting with an occupational health service. These exchanges are usually necessary; they are a prerequisite for high-quality service delivery. Think of tackling multi-problem situations, complex chain collaborations, regional healthcare networks, public-private partnerships, and the deployment of external specialists and freelancers.And yet, in practice, this is organizationally and legally complex.
Professionals often need to act quickly, while a growing framework of legislation forces them to exercise utmost care. Think of the GDPR, NIS2, the Cyber Security Act, and the AI Act. Add sector-specific laws to that list, such as the Youth Act, the Wmo (Social Support Act), or the Police Data Act. All these regulations can complement each other, but sometimes they directly counteract one another.
New legislation, such as the Wams (Act on Tackling Multi-Problem Situations in the Social Domain), attempts to create clarity. By providing municipalities with a clear legal basis for sharing data in complex cases, it removes the barriers that have hindered professionals for years.
Meanwhile, daily work must continue. How do professionals solve this in practice? Broadly speaking, there are four ways to exchange data, each with its own benefits and specific risks.
Four methods of data exchange and why they friction
1. Automated chain exchange
This is the most strictly regulated variant. Examples include the iWmo message traffic in the social domain or CORV within the criminal justice chain. Data flows automatically from one source system to another, using fixed standards and without requiring manual intervention from an employee. Increasingly, organizations are looking toward European standards such as International Data Spaces (IDS). This is a blueprint for controlled data sharing where the original owner retains control over their own data.
The bottleneck: These systems are secure and fully audited, but they are also costly, slow, and rigid. They are designed for predictable, repetitive information flows. They may also have privacy flaws due to a lack of opt-out options, making it difficult for patients or clients to object to their information being exchanged.
For an acute situation on a Monday afternoon, this method offers no solution. Furthermore, many partners (such as independent therapists or lawyers) often lack access to these systems entirely.
2. Shared Online Workspaces
Think of Microsoft Teams, Slack, or sector-specific environments like Karify or Nedap ONS. This offers more flexibility: collaborating and sharing files in a shared environment. It often includes options to allow clients or citizens access to a restricted section of the source system.
The downside: One party always dictates the rules. Whoever logs into another organization's environment loses control over their own data. Furthermore, collaborations are usually temporary. Once completed, organizations often forget to revoke access permissions. In addition, many of these platforms lack a so-called zero-knowledge architecture: the vendor can, in principle, access the content.
For Microsoft Teams, this potentially means data visibility from the US, along with all the geopolitical risks that entail today. On top of that, the law in certain sectors imposes strict requirements on data separation; collaborating inside each other's systems is then simply not permitted.
3. Social interaction
This is the informal, relational flow. It focuses purely on low-threshold contact between the organization (healthcare workers, civil servants, legal professionals) and often the client or resident themselves. Think of secure group chats, consultation platforms, or digital "community rooms." Sending messages, calling, or coordinating via a secure group chat. The goal is to act quickly and keep the social cohesion around a case strong.
The downside: No matter how good the intentions are, this is where the boundaries between informal alignment and formal file building blur the fastest. As soon as a brief discussion shifts to sharing sensitive details or strategic decisions, that information ends up in a volatile medium without structure, proper logging, or retention periods.
4. Ad-hoc exchange
The most widely used method in practice: standard email, WhatsApp, WeTransfer, a USB stick, or a shared link to a cloud folder. Not because organizations recommend it, but because it works. Everyone has it at hand, and it requires no extra effort.
The downside: This is exactly where things go wrong most frequently. A message sent to the wrong address, an attachment left lingering in an inbox, or a group chat that still contains a former colleague. Secure email is a conscious improvement over standard email, but even that does not solve the structural problem: the moment the recipient saves and forwards the file, the audit trail is broken and the purpose limitation is lost.
Why this is also a security problem
When thinking about information security, many organizations still primarily focus on access management: who is allowed to log in? However, modern risks run deeper. A secure connection does not mean the content itself remains protected. Many collaboration platforms encrypt data during transit, but can still read, analyze, or scan the content itself. This also applies to metadata: who communicates with whom, when, how often, and about what. In collaborative networks, this metadata is often highly sensitive.
In a zero-knowledge architecture, the keys remain entirely with the users themselves. The vendor cannot read the content—not technically, not legally, and not operationally. This has major positive implications for data protection:
- Data remains unreadable in the event of a data breach or hack.
- Foreign legal claims or cloud mandates lose their effect.
- Internal administrators at the vendor cannot peek into the data.
- Organizations retain control over their own confidentiality and digital sovereignty.
Security thereby shifts from trusting a vendor to cryptographic certainty.
Collaboration also demands information management
Secure collaboration is about more than just encryption. Organizations must also be able to manage the entire lifecycle of information. The core principles that consistently reappear in legislation are:
- Purpose Limitation: Use data only for the previously agreed goal.
- Data Minimization: Share only what is strictly necessary. Do not share an entire file if a single paragraph suffices.
- Access Control: Ensure only authorized personnel have access, and log exactly who they are.
- Integrity and confidentiality: Protect data technically against unauthorized viewing or modification.
- Accountability: Can you prove in hindsight that you acted in accordance with the rules?
- Retention Periods: Automatic deletion or archiving after the applicable statutory period.
- Revocability: The ability to revoke access or delete data whenever necessary.
In practice, this frequently fails the moment information leaves the source system. A PDF in an email inbox has no automated retention period. A forwarded file loses its context. Sharing data via WhatsApp is virtually impossible to manage.
A proper collaboration layer enforces more structure: access per file or participant, automatic deletion, revocable rights, audit logs, and control over reuse. Only then does secure collaboration also become manageable and governable.
Why existing tools are often not designed for this
Most conventional collaboration platforms are fundamentally built for collaboration within a single organization. They are not designed for the complex relationship between independent organizations, each carrying different legal responsibilities, legal bases, and retention obligations. That difference is fundamental.
Within a single organization, centralized control makes perfect sense. But as soon as multiple organizations collaborate, a need arises for mutual autonomy and shared control, which standard tools cannot provide.
The secure hub as a pragmatic answer
Better enforcement and increased awareness are important, and they will always be necessary. People make mistakes, and regulations without compliance are hollow. However, enforcement does not solve the underlying design flaw. As long as the secure method is cumbersome and the insecure method is fast, you already know what choices people will make.
The solution lies in a smart intermediary layer: a secure, independent hub that bridges organizational boundaries without requiring everyone to work inside each other's internal systems. It functions not as a replacement for existing source systems, but as an independent meeting place for what organizations need to achieve together, without dragging the rest of the organization along with them.
A proper hub tackles daily operations in the following ways:
Sharing only what is necessary.
True data minimization sometimes means the other party only needs to know whether something is the case, without viewing the underlying report.
Sharing the conclusion rather than the comprehensive details.
Creating and storing within the secure environment.Not everything relevant to a collaboration already exists elsewhere as a document. Meeting minutes, log entries, and notes can be created and stored directly within the encrypted workspace, ensuring everything related to a case or project converges in one place.
Zero-knowledge architecture.
Full client-side encryption ensures that even the platform vendor can never access the content. This leaves the data unreadable in the event of a data breach and useless against foreign legal claims.
Irrefutable audit trail.
Every action is recorded and technically signed. During an audit or legal review, it can be demonstrated immediately who had access, when it occurred, and what took place.
Practical for external parties.
No hassle with creating user accounts for partners who only need to submit something once. Secure requests via a protected link, utilizing forms that immediately add structure to the incoming data.
Connected to the rest, where needed.
For organizations wishing to process information received through the hub into their own source systems, synchronization is possible via agents. This transforms the hub from just a secure meeting place into a link within the broader data pipeline: controlled, structured, and based on the proper legal grounds.
User-friendly on any device.
An interface that requires no training and works seamlessly on laptops, tablets, and phones. Because security that isn't used protects nothing.
And yes, vulnerabilities remain
A secure hub does not solve everything. Information that has been securely exchanged is subsequently stored in local systems that carry their own risks. People still make mistakes, and systems still have vulnerabilities.However, the distinction between exchange and storage is vital.
A large portion of data breaches do not occur during storage, but rather during transit: information intercepted along the way, delivered to the wrong address, lingering too long in an inbox, or shared with too many people.
A secure hub raises the standard at exactly that vulnerable moment. Simultaneously, it provides the structure that ensures collaboration no longer has to clash with accountability, logging, and compliance.
Databeamer as a neutral collaborationlayer
Databeamer was developed for situations where organizations must collaborate, but cannot or are not permitted to work fully inside each other's systems. It serves not as a replacement for existing source systems, but as an independent trust layer between them: fully end-to-end encrypted, featuring hybrid post-quantum encryption, built in Europe, free from AI content scanning, and providing complete control over access, logging, and retention periods.
Ensuring that collaboration no longer has to clash with security and regulation.