Networking

Free Unified Communications Security Webinar

If you’re free next Wednesday, October 28, you should mark your calendar and plan on attending The Final Frontier: Secure Unified Communications to Any Device in Any Place at 12pm Eastern time (9am Pacific).

Unified communications, like just about any useful technology, can be a double-edged sword. Often, for every benefit or convenience there is a tradeoff of increased risk and exposure. As organizations work to extend unified communications to smart phones and wireless devices, they face even more security and compliance challenges.

The webinar is being presented by Sipera Systems and Aberdeen Research and will include the latest research and industry trends, real-world scenarios from actual deployments, and best practices for deploying unified communications securely.

Sprint Rolls Out General Availability of SIP Trunking

Sprint was one of the first SIP trunk providers certified with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS 2007 R2). Now it is expanding availability of SIP trunking to all business customers.

Sprint SIP trunking customers will be able to leverage Sprint’s Global MPLS network and utilize a single IP network connection to facilitate voice, date, and video conferencing connections.

SIP trunking and VoIP enable customers to save significantly over traditional local and long distance expenses, and it is also a key component of unified communications.

Secure Your Mobile Devices with DUST

Mobile devices are a critical component of enterprise communications and a core element of unified communications. They used to just be phones, but now they are more like tiny micro-laptops that fit in a pocket. With that increased functionality and ability to store massive amounts of data comes an acutely greater need for security.

An industry analyst firm has developed a model for managing mobile security and compliance. The DUST Model for Managing the Risk to Enterprise Mobility establishes guidelines and provides a framework for end-to-end compliance practices and security controls.

The guidelines have four primary components that make up the DUST:

• Devices
• Users
• Sessions
• Transactions

You can get more details on the DUST Model from this CRG Research Brief.

Verizon Unveils Vendor-Agnostic Managed Mobility

Verizon would love to be the sole provider of mobile communications services for every customer around the world. But, realizing that won’t ever happen it is going for the next best thing- managing mobile communications for customers regardless of the mobile carrier(s) they are using.

The concept is not ground-breaking in and of itself. Other technology service providers such as BT and IBM, as well as competing mobile carriers like AT&T already have similar offerings to help customers manage mobility throughout the enterprise and around the world.

Verizon is bringing a little something extra by including mobile security tools from Sybase and mobile expense management tools from Quickcomm Software Solutions. The resulting suite of services consists of five modules which can be mixed and matched to suit customer needs: inventory and expense management; logistics; mobile device management; mobile security and application management.

As the number one mobile service carrier in the United States, Verizon has a decent foundation to build on. We’ll see if the Verizon name combined with a different mix of tools is a recipe for success.

SIP Trunking: The Key to Maximizing UC Benefits

VoIP and unified communications each have a lot of promise in and of themselves. They each deliver innovative tools that allow businesses to operate more effectively and efficiently. As the Executive Summary of this presentation states though, deploying UC is not without challenges.

Too often, organizationsgo down the path of deploying new technology with old technology principles in mind and UC is no different. Many of the early adopter deployments of VoIP and UC were designed exactly the same as the old systems, severely limiting the overall value of UC, which is a highly flexible, IP-based solution.

Migrating from traditional trunk lines to SIP trunking is a very simple, cost-effective change to open doors to other advanced services that can enhance a UC deployment. SIP trunking will allow companies to recognize the following benefits:

• Dramatically lower the overall cost of communications
• Extends UC to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and other cloud-based options
• Accelerates UC deployments through the simplification of network design
• Easier migration to other advanced services such as mobile integration and MPLS networks

For more about SIP trunking and the impact that SIP trunking has on a successful UC deployment, check out this TechTarget presentation: SIP Trunking Is Key to Accelerating Unified Communications Deployments

Troubleshooting VoIP / UC Issues

Networking has always been a more or less imperfect science…perhaps more of an art? The TCP/IP suite of protocols are designed with the base concept that transmitting packets of data is prone to errors and the protocols need to have mechanisms built in to manage dropped packets, latency, and other issues.

With normal data networking it may not be a big deal if packets arrive out of order. As long as the TCP/IP protocols can reassemble them in the proper order there may be a millisecond or two of lag but the data will get there. However, with voice and video a millisecond may as well be a millenia. With VoIP, and audio/video conferencing it is much more important that data arrive quickly and in order.

Microsoft provides a comprehensive amount of guidance and documentation including Troubleshooting Enterprise Voice: Approaches, Procedures, and Tools.

One valuable tool for monitoring and troubleshooting network issues is a network analyzer (also known as a protocol analyzer or packet sniffer). I recently had an opportunity to work with the Capsa Enterprise Network Analyzer and would recommend it as a powerful, cost-effective tool for troubleshooting VoIP / UC, as well as other network issues. You can learn more about Capsa Enterprise from this review (there is also a link to a more extensive product white paper).

Nortel UC For Sale

Unified communications is still a young, emerging industry. In its short lifespan the number of players has quickly grown. One of the biggest companies in unified communications has been Nortel. The Canadian network hardware giant had a solid relationship with Microsoft and visions of grandeur of taking on Avaya and Cisco.

After filing for bankruptcy protection though, Nortel is apparently taking a look in the mirror and trying to return to a simpler time with a more aggressive focus on their core business- networking. So, they sold their wireless communications infrastructure business to Nokia-Siemens. Now they are apparently considering selling off their unified communications division with Avaya and Siemens-Enterasys being suggested as the leading contenders.

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A Recipe for Success

Remember when Cisco was a network hardware company? Cisco and networking were virtually synonymous and you knew who to call if you needed a router or a switch. Once upon a time, Avaya was a provider of enterprise communications equipment. If you needed phones or maybe an IP PBX, you could call Avaya. In days gone by Microsoft focused on server and desktop operating systems and developing software applications to help businesses be more productive. Ah, the good ole days.

To be fair, each of those companies still does what it used to. But, now the waters are muddy as they all try to be all things to all customers. As Joe Schurman, CEO of Evangelyze Communications and author of Microsoft Voice and Unified Communications, points out in his musings from Voicecon 2009, nobody was content with their piece of the pie and now they all want to be the whole pie.

The thing is, none of them really have ALL of the ingredients necessary to make the best pie. If I could only buy a pie from one company I would get my pie from Microsoft because they have the most complete list of ingredients. I might need to top it off with some additional ingredients like SmartSIP, but the Microsoft Unified Communications platform offers the most comprehensive and innovative features in the most cost effective and flexible solution of the major players.

That said, these vendors and the customers both benefit when they stop competing to be the whole pie and instead focus on how to integrate their ingredients to cooperate to make the best pie possible. A Microsoft Unified Communications platform using Avaya or Nortel communications equipment connected to a Cisco network infrastructure seems like a recipe for success.

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Microsoft and Cisco Make Nice…Again

It is no secret that Microsoft holds a dominant position in the server and desktop OS market as well as the office applications market. However, Microsoft products need networking equipment in order to interconnect and communicate and Cisco has a dominant place in the networking and routing hardware market.

So, when Microsoft and Cisco both jumped into the unified communications arena it made some ripples. The two giants are competing head to head for dominance of the lucrative unified communications market with very different approaches and very different visions of what unified communications actually is.

Microsoft- being Microsoft- approaches unified communications from a software perspective and is working toward a goal of a pure software PBX solution and replacing  the traditional PBX. Cisco, on the other hand- being Cisco- has a more network and IP telephony-centric approach to unified communications. They each approach the market from their traditional strengths.

At one point, they had pledged to agree to disagree, but work together for the common good. That rhetoric lasted about until Microsoft unveiled Office Communications Server 2007 and then the gloves were off as they slammed each other’s products and solutions and went for the proverbial jugular.

In this market though, with this economy, they appear to have a renewed partnership. There is an old Arabic proverb: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”. In this case, Microsoft and Cisco have a common enemy in the economic malaise which makes them friends by association.

In order to boost customer confidence and ensure that enterprises do not delay purchasing decisions waiting for a clear winner, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Cisco CEO John Chambers have vowed to ensure that their competing systems will interoperate and work together.

Managing VoIP Quality

The TCP/IP suite of protocols was designed with some safeguards against packet latency and alternative routing. When sending a data file, some packets may take a different path than others and the packets may arrive out of order. But, with TCP/IP that is OK because the protocols understand how to sequence the packets and reassemble them in the proper order so that the data arrives intact- even if it is a few milliseconds later.

Well, when you put voice communications on a TCP/IP network the demands are a little different. The PowerPoint presentation being downloaded won’t really matter if it takes a millisecond longer or what order the packets arrive in as long as they arrive. However, voice communications is now. It is real-time. It is imperative that the packets reach the listeners ear in order and with minimal delay in order to facilitate a voice conversation and mirror as closely as possible the voice communications experience that callers are used to with traditional telephone systems. Streaming video for online video calls or video conferencing is even more data intensive and still demands that the data get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, uninterrupted and in order.

This is one of the challenges that organizations face as they attempt to migrate to VoIP and unified communications. The underlying network architecture and available bandwidth are a critical foundation that can make or break the success of VoIP and unified communications in the organization. These needs have opened the door for a whole new generation of networking and quality of service equipment designed specifically around VoIP and bandwidth-intensive streaming media applications.

 Ensuring Voice and Video Quality About More Than Watching Packet Flows.