Tuesday, May 1, 2007
2:00pm ET
11:00am PT

Securely Enabling VoIP Remote Users
Enterprises are embracing VoIP and Unified Communications to increase productivity and improve collaboration. But the true potential of new business applications, such as IM, whiteboarding, and presence, have yet to be realized because most VoIP deployments are implemented as a closed overlay on the data network. These benefits can be increased tenfold if the IP PBX and its real-time communications applications are extended to remote users.

More importantly, cost savings, business continuity, employee lifestyle, and the trend towards outsourcing are compelling enterprises to open up their communications beyond their physical perimeters. Softphones or Web phones used by road warriors and consultants, hard phones used by teleworkers or at remote sites, and WiFi/dual mode handsets with SIP clients used by the mobile workforce all have the potential to change the face of communications as we know it.

To enable all of these various types of VoIP remote users, an enterprise needs to solve privacy and authentication issues, firewall/NAT traversal, enforce fine-grained unified communications policies, and protect against the application layer threats that exist when opening up the internal voice VLAN to the data VLAN or the untrusted external network. 

This presentation will examine the deployment issues that need to be addressed so enterprise can securely extend their VoIP networks to soft clients, hard phones at remote sites, WiFi/dua -mode phones and click-to-talk/Web phone applications. It will also look at a number of common threats, including reconnaissance, Denial of Service (DoS)/Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), Stealth DoS, spoofing, and VoIP spam, in order to explore the best practices methods and techniques to protect all VoIP, IM, and other unified communications.

Be sure to bring your questions!  After the presentation, the webcast will be open for a live Q&A.

About the Speakers:
Krishna Kurapati, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Sipera Systems Krishna founded Sipera Systems in 2003 and serves as the CTO where he oversees Sipera’s strategic product direction and architecture while leading the product management and research teams. An industry expert with over 15 years experience in voice and security technologies, Krishna holds 5 patents and speaks at industry conferences.

A serial entrepreneur, Krishna co-founded IPCell Technologies, in 1998 and served as the VP of Engineering where he led the development of the world’s first Class 5/4 softswitch. IPCell was acquired by Cisco for $213 million and, from 2000-2002, Krishna was the Director of Engineering with Cisco spearheading the BTS10200 Softswitch product Krishna holds an MS from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and BE from Osmania University, Hyderabad.

Associate Editor, Technology Marketing Corporation
In addition to his work with TMC’s IP Communications publications, Erik is a contributor to TMCnet.  Prior to joining the TMC team, he was Managing Editor at Global Custodian, a global securities services publication, where he also managed the magazine’s survey research. Erik began his professional career at management consulting firm Leadership Research Institute.