The Challenge

Unified Communications (UC) is the integration of real-time communication services such as instant messaging (IM Chat), IP telephony, video Conferencing and speech recognition with non real-time communication services such as unified messaging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMS and fax). UC is not a single product, but a set of products that provides a consistent unified user interface and user experience across multiple devices and media types.

As the popularity of unified communications technologies such as VoIP is heading towards the mainstream within corporate environment, there is still not a lot of emphasis on the risk and threats associated with unified communication systems. On top of this, implementation of a unified communication system could introduce to new unique security risks that security administrators may not have deal with it in the past and may be not well equipped to handle.

With known ports opened on the firewall to allow VoIP and UC traffic through, organizations must perform deep packet inspection and continuously monitoring of application traffic to protect the VoIP network, endpoints and IP PBXs from thousands of application-layers attacks that can cause the IP PBXs to crash, lost of services and degradation of voice quality.

The Solution

Common requirements across all the mandates are that the enterprises carefully assess the risk of inappropriate handling of protected data, including the transmission of information via various applications both internally and externally and how the encryption is handled. Thus it is mission critical for security appliances to be designed and built to enable the organization to secure communications, comply with privacy mandates, and easily record and monitor unified communication to document compliance.

The solution should offer real-time UC security that allows organizations to enjoy the benefits of SIP trunks without the risks. It must be able to support the information security and privacy requirements of enterprises in a wide range of industries such as financial, education, healthcare and many others. It should also be designed to support mandate compliance while seamlessly integrate into the existing organization infrastructure, enabling secured UC.