VoIP Security: The Great Afterthought

Why is security always an afterthought? It seems that time and again there are technological innovations that businesses embrace. They do their due diligence to compare their options. They invest heavily to purchase and implement the new technology. They spend money to educate users to take advantage of the new technology. Much later, usually after there is an actual incident, security finally comes into the picture.

Often, it is a matter of money. New technologies can help the business run more efficiently. New technologies can increase productivity. Security, on the other hand, is an investment of money to prevent a greater loss of money as a result of a security incident or data compromise. It works in reverse. Rather than increasing the bottom line, security prevents the bottom line from going down. But, security is only beneficial if and when there is an actual security incident to prevent. It is like an insurance policy. You pay for it and hope you never have to use it, and it is very easy to rationalize that it is reasonable to accept the risk and take the gamble that the event will never occur rather than investing money to safeguard against it.

TechTarget’s SearchUnifiedCommunications site takes a deeper look at the issue of VoIP and unified communications security in the article Unified Communications Security Ignored and Misunderstood.