Surveys of business, financial and IT professionals are continuously being conducted on a worldwide basis. Every couple of months, or even weeks, a new report is released to inform us about the respondents’ concerns. If you were to read all of these reports, the one factor that is almost always of paramount concern is security.
Back in 2009, the term BYOD was coined. This refers to bring your own device, or the policy of permitting employees to bring personally owned mobile devices, such as laptops, tablets and smart phones to their workplace. In addition they use these devices to access privileged company information and applications.
In conjunction with allowing employees to use their personal devices, organizations have begun to embrace the benefits of implementing voice over IP, or VoIP technologies as a way of not only bringing down their communications costs, but also offering a lot more flexibility and scalability throughout their phone system.
The combination of BYOD and VoIP allows companies, employees and clients to communicate from anywhere in the world over the Internet. While this is a major benefit, most companies implementing VoIP are concerned about quality-of-service (QoS) considerations, such as voice quality, latency and interoperability it seems that some have forgotten an important concern.
Graham Yellowley, who is director of technology services at Mitsubishi (News - Alert) UFJ Securities International, an investment bank, feels that the "Lower cost of calls is always attractive but the main driver is a single point which can consolidate email, voicemail and faxes in one place accessible by one device. In this world where work/life balance is out of kilter for most people a single communications point is beneficial, though it also means that there is no escape from work."
I mentioned the surveys above, and while being able to conduct video conference calls on any mobile device is something that everyone wants, it seems that this has become the main concern, rather than security. The fact of the matter is that some telecom decision makers feel that VoIP is insecure.
As more organizations move to a VoIP telecom system, more IP security risks find their way into the traditional voice side of the network. This requires that VoIP implementations also include measures such as encrypting voice services, building redundancy into VoIP networks and performing regular security audits to secure the network.
According to a recent article in CSO the first step to take towards a secure VoIP system is to ensure that your provider has several security layers at their end. You have to ask a lot of questions when assessing your provider of the choice. The provider needs to know the ins and outs of VoIP in order to provide the best possible options and security.
On the organization’s end, all the same precautions used for their IP networks need to be implemented for their VoIP system. Properly configured firewalls need to be put in place, IP addresses need to constantly be monitored and call encryption should be instituted.
BYOD and VoIP make it possible to have a lot of employees working from home or on the road, which means that they are in constant contact with company data over the Internet. Having a VPN for your remote users, using strong passwords and have them implemented across the board are a good start to providing necessary security measures.
On the other end, you need to make sure that your provider updates software regularly, security patches are a constant update and they are to ensure continued reliability. In addition, if you are using a cloud-based hosted VoIP provider, make sure that their security measures work across all of the networks that they use, especially if your employees travel around the world.