To ensure the services you get from a UCaaS provider will be highly reliable, available and useful, you need to delve into how the provider is actually delivering its services. To determine what sorts of questions a potential customer may want to ask, I talked with Ryan Tadeo, Director of Sales Engineering with hosted UC provider ANPI. He says the issues boil down to three major categories: the provider’s network, the level of security it offers and how it integrates is applications with your existing environment.

Availability and Redundancy: Key Requirements for a UCaaS Provider’s Network

A number of factors contribute to the level of availability and redundancy a UCaaS provider can deliver, Tadeo says, beginning with the number of network access points it supports. If your provider has just a single access point and it goes down, you’re out of luck. Most providers do have at least two, usually to different hosting facilities. That’s better but each is typically associated with a single IP address. That means if the primary facility goes down, all of your on-site UC equipment, including handsets, have to reboot before they can connect to the backup facility, Tadeo says.

A better approach is to not only have multiple hosting facilities, but have multiple ways to get at each of them. He likens it to using a navigation application in your car. If the app shows there’s a traffic jam on your primary route, it may send you to your destination via an alternate route. ANPI takes a similar tack, using multiple circuits to each of its hosting facilities and then using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) tables to find alternate routes for traffic to take should the primary route fail.

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Dig Deeper: Download the Whitepaper 5 Keys to Building the Financial Case for Hosted UC
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What’s more, it’s best if the UCaaS provider employs circuits from a number of different carriers, so there’s no single point of failure. “If a provider has one data center on the east coast and another on the west coast, that’s great. But if they’re both with the same carrier and that carrier has a routing issue, then you’ve got problems,” Tadeo says.

The third key pillar to look for in terms of availability is server redundancy. Equipment has a tendency to fail, so it’s important that any given service be capable of running on backup equipment. Look for a provider that implements redundancy at multiple levels, with two pairs of high-availability servers at each of its two data centers. Both pairs at one data center would have to fail before an application would fail over to the backup data center, meaning it’s only likely to happen in the case of a catastrophic event.

Proper UCaaS Security Requires a Dual-SBC Strategy

In terms of providing security, it’s been well-documented on this site that a session border controller is crucial to ensuring security for any UC environment. With full awareness of the session initial protocol (SIP) stack, SBCs can identify malformed packets and prevent denial of service attacks, attempted hacks into an IP-PBX and more.

Your provider will almost certainly be employing an SBC, hopefully with another on standby as a backup. But ideally it should employ a dual-SBC strategy, with one SBC facing the end customer and another facing the carrier.

With that setup, imagine the customer-facing SBC goes down. The customer can be automatically routed to the carrier-facing SBC, with no service interruption (assuming the carrier configures everything correctly with respect to its Domain Naming System records). The configuration also provides an extra layer of security, Tadeo says. A breach in the carrier-facing SBC does not necessarily expose customers because they are registered to a different SBC.  

Assessing Application Integration Capabilities of a UCaaS Provider

Finally, for a UCaaS solution to be truly useful, it must integrate gracefully with your everyday business applications.

“When a call hits your network, can the phone integrate with your customer relationship management application? Can you do a screen pop with Salesforce.com?” he asks. “That type of capability is important to streamlining business processes and improving productivity.”  

The key to ensuring a provider does allow such integration is whether it offers well-defined, open application programming interfaces (APIs), he says. If it does, then you should be able to connect the UC solution to the applications that are most important to your employees and your company business processes, Tadeo says.

That’s our list of key issues to look at when assessing a UCaaS provider. We’d be interested in whether you’ve got other criteria. Let us know using the comments below.

The post 3 Key Issues to Address When Vetting UCaaS Providers appeared first on The UC Buyer.

So I caught up with Thomas Negron,  senior systems engineer for Sonus Networks, which makes SBCs. He proved to be a fountain of information on the topic and, as it turns out, the list of differences between firewalls and SBCs is long.Before we jump in, Negron is quick to point out that Session Border Controllers do not replace firewalls. Rather, an SBC complements firewalls, providing functions that firewalls don’t, but not all of those that firewalls do.

Providing Security for SIP-enabled Traffic

To get nerdy right out of the gate, a firewall looks at traffic at Layers 3 and 4 of the OSI stack, including IP and TCP/UDP traffic. SBCs, on the other hand, can deal with any layer of the stack, up to applications at Layer 7. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), for example, which is used to set up and tear down real-time communications sessions such as those in a UC network, works at Layer 7.

Normally firewalls have fairly static configurations. They allow traffic from certain points to flow through specific ports to a defined destination, subject to certain thresholds, such as to prevent traffic overloads. And it can stop traffic from any end points that are not allowed.

Dig Deeper:  Download Session Border Controllers for Dummies for Free

Some firewalls go a step further and have limited awareness of SIP, Negron says. Maybe they’re able to dynamically open and close known SIP ports, rather than leaving them pegged open as a normal firewall would.

An SBC, on the other hand, has full awareness of the SIP stack and the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), which is used to carry traffic such as voice and video. As such, it can “peel the onion and have an inherent awareness of where packets are coming from and going to, how they should be formed and how to identify malformed packets,” Negron says. Those malformed packets may be legitimate packets or could be malicious; with its awareness of the larger picture, an SBC can tell the difference whereas even a SIP-aware firewall could not.

That capability enables an SBC to police against attacks that occur at higher layers, such as on video or audio streams. An SBC could detect and prevent a denial of service attack targeting a video port, for example.

With its application layer awareness, an SBC also understands what kind of bandwidth rates and packet sequencing are required to prevent a flood of RTP packets from inundating the network, a capability that is beyond the scope of a firewall.

Likewise, an SBC can detect when someone is trying to spoof caller ID numbers or hack into a PBX. The hackers can then force the PBX to dial out to numbers that no one in the company would normally dial, such as costly 900 numbers whose owners give the hackers a cut of the profits. The New York Times recently ran a story detailing how a seven-person architecture firm fell victim to the scheme:

Hackers had broken into the phone network of the company, Foreman Seeley Fountain Architecture, and routed $166,000 worth of calls from the firm to premium-rate telephone numbers in Gambia, Somalia and the Maldives. It would have taken 34 years for the firm to run up those charges legitimately, based on its typical phone bill, according to a complaint it filed with the Federal Communications Commission.

An SBC would have been able to thwart such an attack because it would have identified all those calls as out of the norm. That’s because SBCs understand the state of call sessions – including number from and number to, user name and company policies around time of day routing, least cost routing and such – and can police all of these aspects to ensure adherence to policies.

SBCs can also encrypt sessions when required, which is a best practice on Microsoft Lync networks, Negron says. “So if someone gets access to a switch they can’t just tap in and hear your credit card number over the phone.”

How SBCs Provide Interoperability

SBCs also diverge from firewalls by providing a number of functions that go well beyond the security focus of firewalls.

One significant capability is providing interworking that enables different flavors of SIP to work with one another. “SIP was purposely written to be very broad, which means everybody’s SIP variant is a little different,” Negron says. “An SBC knows about these variants and can interwork between them.” That enables a Microsoft Lync UC implementation to work with Cisco UC applications, for example.  “It lifts the burden of interoperability off the customer,” he says.

Similarly, an SBC can provide transcoding between different protocols, such as the older H.323 for voice and video and SIP.  

The post Highlighting the Differences: Firewalls vs. Session Border Controllers appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Migrating to a unified communications infrastructure can be tricky for companies with lots of legacy equipment to deal with, including PBXs of both the TDM and IP varieties. Few are in position to simply rip out all of the old and install the new. More likely, it’ll be a phased migration, where old and new have to co-exist for some period of time.

Perhaps you’ve got TDM interfaces you need to support for some subset of the organization. Or maybe you’ve got an IP-PBX that provides specific services that certain segments of your organization can’t do without, at least not yet.

Many companies don’t want to or can’t afford to replace all their handsets at once, which can drive the need to retain some legacy PBX equipment.  They may also have fax machines (don’t laugh) and concerns about E911 capabilities.

Or maybe they simply started with a UC solution such as Microsoft Lync for its instant messaging and presence capabilities and are now interested in migrating to enterprise voice, and realizing that’s going to be a little more complicated.

For all of these reasons and more, companies may find that migrating to a UC-based voice solution may be a process that takes years, not months. During that time, elements of their old environment have to coexist with the new.

Smooth the UC Migration with an SBC

The good news is there’s a tool available to help companies weather the migration storm: a session border controller. One of the functions of an SBC is to act as an intermediary between old and newer communications equipment.

SBCs provide transcoding of the protocols used by legacy and newer equipment and software. For example, an SBC can ensure an older fax machine or automatic call distributor can work with newer UC-based voice servers such as Lync.

That can be an important consideration, because many companies underestimate the number of analog devices still being used in their networks, all of which need to interoperate with the UC solution. Fax machines, common area phones, paging systems, and more all need to be accounted for to ensure a successful migration.

SBCs can also distribute calls on their own. When it recognizes a call is to a number supported by the legacy PBX, it performs the necessary transcoding to ensure it gets through. Ditto for calls destined for the UC voice server.

It’s likely that the mix of telecommunications services will likewise change as companies get deeper into their UC deployments, with SIP trunks replacing PSTN links. Here again, a good SBC is a crucial component, as it can provide interworking between various flavors of the SIP protocol used by different UC components and even carriers.

When used with SIP trunks, SBCs can also help provide redundancy and business continuity. The combination allows calls to be automatically rerouted in the event of a failure at any location. What’s more, an SBC can support 3G/4G wireless connections in the even of the primary trunk fails.

Using an SBC allows companies to embark on a more gradual migration to UC, enabling employees to continue using familiar systems while they learn the new ones.

The post When Rip and Replace Won’t Do: Keys to Migrating to UC at Your Own Pace appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Mike Cromwell and Dave Gilbert spoke with John Young and Derek Dionian from Netfortris about this very issue. 

In the UC space, there are a variety of periphery technologies that empower and enable the solution. Internet service, SD-WAN, networking, devices, and soft clients are just a few. It is intimidating enough for a customer to reach out to change something critical and core to their business, such as telephony, only to be told to pursue another vendor first for their Internet, and another for their network, and so on. 

If your service provider can, instead, become a solution provider, and handle these pieces for the customer, you are simply more likely to close the prospect and you can capture all of the revenue from that client.

John describes the Netfortris model, saying, “we put together solution architects, we put together engineering teams, and we take a team approach to building a customer.” In other words, they take a holistic approach and form bespoke service offerings based on the customer’s needs.

Does this mean you can simply maintain a few line items in your catalog and offer add-ons for the customer who also needs some network upgrades? To do it well, your team needs to be able to become experts on those technologies and solutions on the perimeter of UCaaS. Create your own custom offerings and stay ahead of the curve. Know the routers you will recommend, understand the ins and outs of the SD-WAN backups, and appreciate the nuance of the Internet services you will provide.

Become someone who continues to innovate their products, and doesn’t treat them as throw-ins to their preferred platform.

Watch more of the conversation here:

The post Tips on Providing Combined Services in the UCaaS Space appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Related Blog: Managers Create Their Own Private Internet with SD-WAN

At the Comptia Show in Las Vegas, I had a chance to talk with Aaron Kaffen, the VP of Marketing for Bigleaf Networks. They have differentiated themselves when it comes to SD-WAN deployments with their specially designed platform, which, according to Aaron, “is designed specifically for the needs of customers like [the ones] MSPs run into: smaller businesses or distributed businesses.”

“We help companies that are using cloud based technologies like VoIP or Office 365 to create a more performant and reliable connection to those cloud technologies.” – Aaron Kaffen

When it comes to failover, though, they really shine. Aaron says, “Failover is a big deal, as everyone who relies on the Internet knows. Internet performance and reliability is always an issue.” Bigleaf takes this burden head-on by establishing themselves as a single IP provider – granting the customer their own IP address block in order to move their traffic seamlessly and automatically between IP address that are known to be clear.

This leads to faster, cleaner, and more reliable Internet performance. And in technologies like VoIP, which is IP dependant, this critical differentiation can really make a profound and noticeable difference.

You can see more of my conversation with Aaron here:

The post Bigleaf Network’s Unique Approach to SD-WAN appeared first on The UC Buyer.

How is an ATA Used?

ATAs are needed to use an analog device on an UC network. A VoIP phone, for example, has a MAC address that serves as its Internet identity, allowing the VoIP service to “see” it. Analog devices have no Internet visibility, so the ATA serves this purpose. Think of it as the PO Box for the device, which allows the Internet to send and receive information from it.

How Do I Configure an ATA? 

The ATA itself, being a very minimalist device, will most often have a portal that is accessed by entering its IP address on a computer connected to the same local network. Since these portals vary by manufacturer and firmware version, a comprehensive guide is impossible. But, luckily, most of the portals have internal help guides to assist you.

Many times, especially on a new deployment, the ATA will be plug and play. Hook it to your network and power, wait until the lights on the face stop blinking (it will almost always update its internal firmware) and connect your phone, fax or other device. Viola! You have a dial tone on the VoIP network.

You will be given advice from the company that furnishes your service if any of the configuration settings within the ATA need to be updated, in the case of number porting, for example. After the initial setup, there is almost no reason you would have to access the IP Portal again.

Fax Machines

A very common application of an ATA is to make a traditional fax machine work over VoIP. Perhaps your company has recently upgraded to a nice networked printer with fax capability. You could keep your analog line and its ties to the local phone company, or you could put it on your VoIP platform with an ATA. Make sure your fax machine supports the T38 protocol, which was designed to enable faxing over VoIP. The ATA itself connects the POTS line from the fax machine into an ethernet cable that goes to your network and eventually the cloud.

Public Address Systems

Retail and office locations with established overhead paging systems will be very reluctant to give them up. Luckily, the usual interconnect is an RJ12 plug, and the ATA can be configured with an extension on your network and then connect to the paging system. It might take a little set-up and perhaps some minor retraining, but it can be added as a favorite on the phones in the office. Once the connection has been made to the paging box (usually by simply dialing the extension you set up) the commands will be the same as the employees already know.

Entry Systems

A lot of door buzzers will have a similar interface as PA Systems (above), and they can likewise get addressed in the same manner. Dial the extension and enter the command. The big difference is that, in the past, there might have been just a button to open the door and in this configuration you may have an extension to dial then a key code. Google can be your friend when the original manual is inevitably lost.

For preserving the functionality of legacy equipment, an Analog Telephony Adapter is an inexpensive and easily configured option. It is not really magical, but it can seem like it sometimes.

The post Understanding the ATA appeared first on The UC Buyer.

The answer to that question depends on a number of issues according to Jason Cummins, SVP of Voice Networks at Magna5.  “MPLS is a proven technology and it is not going away anytime soon, especially among larger companies with multiple locations.  These businesses are looking for the direct, guaranteed point-to-point connections and additional capabilities around packet prioritization that MPLS can deliver.  This prioritization is important because your data is going over the same MPLS path and using the same bandwidth and that is a finite resource.  Voice and real time traffic must be prioritized.”  He went on to explain that for the majority of businesses out there, especially if they have a single location, MPLS is not necessary to ensure a high QoS.

VoIP Packets, Delivery and Prioritization and MPLS

When it comes to voice, or really any real-time communications, there are three key metrics that every business cares about:

1. Did all the packets get delivered
2. Did they arrive on-time
3. Did the arrive in the proper order

MPLS extends this for multi-location companies by allowing for priority tags to be attached to the packets to ensure each packet arrives with the right priority as they travel along the protected paths from source to destination.  This control is an important addition for some businesses, but that ability to prioritize packets really only becomes an issue in a network where there is congestion – an issue that many small and medium businesses can effectively address.  No congestion, no need to prioritize packets with MPLS.

Dig Deeper:  Check out the Broadsoft Whitepaper – Premise-based vs. Hosted UC: A Cost of Ownership Comparison 

For businesses considering a UCaaS solution and using an over-the-top approach to real-time communications, there are two key aspects to take into account in order to address the congestion concern.  First, getting the packets to your network edge efficiently and in a prioritied fashion, and second, ensuring you have the necessary bandwidth to get the packets where they need to go without delay.

Optimize Network Hardware Configuration to Prioritize Voice Packet Delivery

According to Cummins, for the majority of businesses considering UCaaS most of the quality issues come from their own LAN and that is the place to start.  “Most off the rack business routers in the market today have some kind of mechanism that allows the voice traffic in the customer’s network to be prioritized.  Companies often use more network resources and bandwidth sharing large data files internally than they do bringing voice out to the internet, and that is where conficts and congestion can arise.”  Taking basic steps to configure the equipment in the LAN to prioritize communication packets can pay major dividends in Quality of Service.   Cummins says he has spoken with many companies that are tightly focused on MPLS, when the quality issues can be found in the network itself.

We went into a bit more detail in a recent post when we discussed a common method for assuring priority of voice and communication packets:

The most common method of taking advantage of this capability is called the dual drop scenario.  In this instance the data network has its own port on the switch and the phones have their own port.  According to Mann, “by separating it out this way, you can easily prioritize the voice and conferencing packets and you are in a better position to deliver a quality experience to your team.” Another way to think about the importance of packet prioritization is, would you rather wait a few extra seconds for your email to show up or experience jitter on twenty percent of your phone calls?  Having the right hardware to prioritize communications packets is critical.

Making Sure You Have Enough Bandwidth for Over-the-Top UCaaS

Once you have your voice packets prioritized and delivered to the network edge and ready to go out over the internet, the next key is making sure you have enough bandwidth to avoid congestion.  But how much is enough?  Lucky you, we covered that in the same post!

…businesses should use the 1 to 6 rule as a starting point.  “The rule of thumb is that businesses need to plan for one active phone call for every six users.  So if you have 60 employees, there will be 10 ongoing calls at any given time…more if you have  a contact center.”  

Toll quality calls require 80Kb per second, per call, so if a business needs to support 10 calls at a time the upload / download speed for voice calls alone is 800K per second.  “Of course that is the baseline.  Companies needs to leave extra room for overhead, extra usage and data,” says Mann, “They also need to take into consideration richer forms of communication like video conferencing, web conferencing and collaboration.”

So is MPLS right for your company?  It’s likely if you’re a medium or larger organization with multiple locations.  If not, look first at ensuring you can prioritize voice traffic on your LAN and that you have enough bandwidth (and then some) to support your UC deployment or your connection to your UCaaS provider.   Actually, you should do that even if you are going with MPLS)  Let us know how you think about this challenge in the comments section below.

The post Addressing MPLS vs Over-the-Top and other UC & UCaaS Quality of Service Questions appeared first on The UC Buyer.

In a traditional WAN, all of the hardware and software must exist on the same network.  If your company adds a new location, you must bring in the same Internet service, provision and configure a new piece of hardware, and setup the firmware to identify and integrate the new location devices. This often requires multiple disciplines, manpower, and specializations to work in tandem to simply add a location to your existing WAN.

How is an SD-WAN Different From a Traditional WAN

With a Software-Defined WAN, sometimes known as a WAN Virtualization, changes this formula by allowing any Internet service to link the varied locations together via cloud-based software, rather than on-premise firmware.  Now, new locations can be turned up and added to an existing WAN with minimal effort, remotely.

By essentially carving out your own network using secure connections over the larger Internet,  you give your enterprise its own private Internet.

How is an SD-WAN Deployed

Typical SD-WAN deployments use an appliance that is provided to the customer and links two or more inexpensive broadband Internet connections to enhance or replace traditional network technologies.  The different locations can aggregate their bandwidth across available connections to provide bandwidth when and where it is needed.

Different ISPs Can Work Together

You might have a location in a city like Dallas, with access to high speed FIOS connections, but your remote location in Odessa can barely muster a 40MB Cable connection.  Then, the distribution center in Atlanta has higher speed Cable, boosting to 500MB. SD-WAN, using the Internet to connect the locations, is fine with this, and you can share files, printers, and other resources as if you were on the same network all along.

Imagine the headache of setting up a WAN with an offshore location.  SD-WAN makes this problem only as big as time zone differences when trying to set up an all-hands meeting.

Failsafes and Redundancies Make For a More Reliable Connection

The SD-WAN appliance will have connections for multiple Internet services.  So, you can have a backup cellular cradle point, or a cable connection in addition to your FIOS connection and the software will seamlessly move from one to the other depending on traffic and uptime, as defined by your own administrator.

What Do You Mean, Administrator?

With application aware QoS, your SD-WAN can continually monitor performance on your broadband connection to optimize quality of service for VoIP traffic.  An administrator can access an easy to use interface to visualize the network in real-time. Your admin can make changes to access points, quality of service, and other application data.

In short, SD-WAN allows you to deliver superior performance even over low-cost broadband all while using existing network topologies.  With SD-WAN, you can build your own private Internet.

The post Managers Create Their Own Private Internet with SD-WAN appeared first on The UC Buyer.

As more businesses migrate to cloud-based communications, whether Skype for Business Cloud PBX or a UCaaS platform, protecting the communications network becomes an immediate concern.  Every business understands the importance of keeping their lines of communications open, avoiding downtime and keeping themselves safe from attack, so it’s no wonder that security is a top priority.  According to a report released by Akamai earlier this year, DDoS and web application attacks are up 23% and 26% year over year.  And once a hacker has you targeted, they don’t let up.  The rate of repeat DDoS attacks has skyrocketed and target organizations get hit an average of 29 times, with one company targeted 283 times. 

As we’ve covered in the past, Session Border Controllers are the answer for businesses looking to secure their communications network, in much the same way that firewalls are for data networks.

RELATED: Firewalls vs. Session Border Controllers: Outlining the Differences. 

But for companies, especially small and medium businesses, focusing on security and deploying an SBC isn’t always top of mind. Although Microsoft ‘strongly recommends’ deploying an SBC with any Skype for Business deployment, it’s estimated fewer than half of the companies do so.  To learn more about how businesses – and the service providers they rely on – are addressing this issue in an increasingly cloud-based world, I recently spoke with Rich DeFabritus, the Senior Product Marketing Manager at Sonus, a leading maker of Session Border Controllers.  “There is no question that as SMBs transition their communications to the cloud, they should be increasingly aware of the need for an SBC,” says DeFabritus.  “As with most technology, they are looking for ways to make it simple to deploy and ideally prefer to minimize the outlay of CAPEX.”

SMBs Looking Towards Communications Service Providers for Cloud Based Security

In the past, we’ve discussed the various options that businesses have when it comes to SBCs, virtualization and the cloud.  This includes the concept of SBC-as-a-Service.  As we explained:

In this instance, the service provider handles all aspects of delivering SBC capabilities as a service from their own cloud.  Customers eliminate all hardware requirements and rely on the Communications Service Provider (CSP) for setup and management, software upgrades and network configuration and security for their SBC instance.  “In this scenario, service providers have their own orchestration software which allows them to adapt to identified traffic spikes,” says [Walter] Kenrich [Director of Marketing at Sonus]. “They can utilize load balancing across instances to elastically react and can even take advantage of analytics to do so dynamically and proactively.”  Just like every other area of computing, expect to see more businesses providing as-a-service offerings for SBCs.

As DeFabritus pointed out, the concept of SBCaaS is very appealing to SMBs because they may not have the internal resources or expertise to deploy and manage their own SBC, even if it is virtualized.  “Our service provider partners have expressed a growing desire among their SMB clients to outsource the management of their entire communications stack, including the security layer.  From their perspective, the optimal solution must be ‘right-sized’, meaning the virtual SBC requires a much smaller footprint than has traditionally been available.”

Delivering SBCaaS With the Right Footprint

According to DeFabritus, the level of interest among smaller businesses for communications security as a service has been a real eye opener for service providers.  “Larger service providers like AT&T and Verizon have relationships with tens of thousands of SMBs and they have customers asking them for solutions on everything from Unified Communications to security.  They want to offer their customers SBCaaS, but only at the level their customers need and a price they can afford.”

This has been a challenge, as the initial software edition SBCs were designed for larger businesses that were early adopters and were comfortable with virtualizing or even outsourcing network functions.  These virtual SBCs can be resource intensive and tend to have a larger footprint, both from a software and hardware perspective, as they need to process the interworking, transcoding and security components of an SBC for a larger enterprise, but do so on COTS (common-off-the-shelf) hardware without specialized hardware and chip sets. 

This is overkill for most businesses, says DeFabritus.  “We have been getting a tremendous amount of interest in our SBC SWe Lite, which is a fully featured SBC that uses the same code base as our SBC 1000 and 2000, but consumes about half the resources of the nearest competitor.”  The reason this is important to service providers is because the solution can be quickly deployed on a standardized server that hosts other virtual applications they manage on behalf of their clients. It is easy to set up, move, manage and scale as customers need, which comes in handy when a customer needs to quickly ramp up their call center for the holidays, for example.

“SBCaaS is gaining traction because enterprises are beginning to realize the importance of securing their mission-critical communications network, and many of them have been putting it off.  Now they have an option that their service providers can offer them on a per user, per month basis that addresses their needs.” 

Sounds like a Goldilocks solution…not too big, not too small, just right.

The post Security Concerns Driving Businesses, Service Providers Towards Virtual SBC’s appeared first on The UC Buyer.

In a recent article discussing Virtual SBC and SBCaaS options, we promised that we would take a closer look how media processing (transcoding and interworking of various communication codecs and protocols), which has traditionally been one of the liabilities of cloud-based SBCs, is being enhanced.  To start, it is important to note that the software that handles the signaling in a Unified Communications environment, things like setting up sessions, session management and GUI presentation, is different than the software handling the media processing.  The signaling component of UC (basically what you see as your UC software) can easily be virtualized and is well suited to run on Central Processing Units (CPUs) in COTS (commercial off the shelf) servers.  This is not always the case with the media processing, as we discussed in this article from late last year.  Interworking and transcoding of many realtime voice or video sessions requires a lot of heavy lifting and a lot of processing power.

Session Border Controllers (SBCs) usually handle media processing beautifully, but traditionally have done so with hardware-based appliances sitting in an enterprise or service provider’s data center.  They utilize custom designed DSP (digital signal processors) chips that are optimized to perform certain repetitive tasks extremely well and very quickly.  Unfortunately for companies looking to virtualize network functions, DSPs are not something you can buy off the shelf and plug into a COTS server.

Heavy Transcoding Loads Can Overload COTS Capacity

For most small and medium businesses (and even some larger ones, depending on their requirements), optimized virtual SBCs are perfectly capable of handling all their media processing requirements in the cloud and are a solid option.  But what about larger enterprises and service providers with more complex needs?  Where does the virtual model start to break down?  According to Daniel Teichman, Senior Manager, Product Marketing at SBC vendor Sonus Networks, Intel general purpose processors are not yet designed for high scale media interworking. “Transcoding involves many small repetitive tasks done over and over again and general purpose CPUs are not fast enough to allow large scale,” explained Teichman. “For example, we will get about 200 G711 – G729 concurrent transcodes – the easiest one to do – in a single core of a very powerful CPU.”  That problem is exacerbated when using more complex codecs like EVRC, AMR-WB/NB, etc., which are the codecs that mobile service providers use.  “In this case the average can drop down to 100 or less per core.”

When you consider that Sonus has appliance-based SBCs that can handle thousands of concurrent transcoded media sessions, you can see the challenges that larger organizations need to address.  “Throwing lots of blade servers with dozens of core processors at the problem quickly starts to negate the cost effective nature of moving to an all software-based solution,” says Teichman.

Leveraging GPUs to Scale Media Processing in the Cloud

One very promising approach to solving this challenge is to leverage Graphical Processing Units, or GPU chips.  For you gamers out there, you recognize GPUs as the chips that take the processor intensive, repetitive,  graphics processing requirements away from your computer’s primary chip and handle them so they don’t negatively impact overall machine performance.  The better your GPU card, the better the game play, even at the highest resolution…I’m not saying that I’ve spent a lot of money buying the best GPUs for my new PC’s over the years to ensure performance, but…..I have.  Don’t tell my wife.

According to Teichman, Sonus has been seeing terrific results in their virtual SBCs when leveraging GPUs in a COTS environment.  “GPUs are designed to perform the same tasks over and over again, very quickly and efficiently, so in that way they are very close to DSPs.  Our testing has shown that GPUs drive down costs, power consumption and rack space requirements, while improving performance.”  Sonus has been busy optimizing their software to take advantage of GPUs for media transcoding and it is showing great promise in allowing the virtual SBC architecture to scale.  “GPUs are low cost, easy to buy and COTS servers recognize them and know what to do with them,” says Teichman.  

So, GPUs are the answer to processing media in the cloud.  I’m not surprised.  Us gamers have always been on the cutting edge.

The post Are GPUs the Answer to Scaling Media Processing in the Cloud appeared first on The UC Buyer.

To gain more insight into what SMBs can expect, I recently caught up with Gary WIilson, the Director of Product Management responsible for SIP Trunking at Hosted UC provider Onvoy.  “For most SMBs, SIP Trunking is going to deliver significant benefits and cost savings,” says Wilson.  “The key is to plan effectively and migrate in a manner that minimizes disruption and avoids downtime.”

SIP Promises Big Benefits to Small Business

First things first.  Why move to SIP?  According to Wilson, for small businesses there are two main answers to that question: cost savings and preparation for moving to advanced communications like UC or UCaaS.  Let’s start with the latter.  SIP handles several fundamental functions in a UC environment that traditional TDM lines cannot, including:

1. Device capabilities: SIP can determine what kind of device the end user is employing and what sorts of communication the device can support, so it can set up the call appropriately. For example, one user may want to initiate a video call with three others, but one of them is using a device that only supports voice. SIP will initiate a video call for the three who can handle it and a voice call to the fourth participant.
2. Session setup: SIP establishes the ground rules or parameters for a call between two or more participants.
3. Availability: SIP enables users to tell the UC system whether or not they’re available at any given time, giving rise to functions such as presence.
4. Management: SIP also handles management of the call, including any transfers, modifications (such as graduating from audio to video) and call termination.

These capabilities put small businesses in position to easily deploy advanced capabilities like UC, presence management, IM, web and video conferencing and more and as a major bonus it does so while lowering telecommunication costs (up to 50% for many businesses).  So even if businesses are not ready to pull the trigger on UC, SIP delivers significant benefits.

For starters, simply replacing a T1 line with a SIP trunk will likely save money because of the way carriers charge for the lines, Wilson says. T1s and PRI lines, for example, are sold in chunks of maybe eight or 24 channels, which translate to the number of simultaneous calls the line can handle. But many smaller offices may only need one or two sessions, so the remaining capacity is wasted. “SIP is one-to-one,” he says. “If you only need to support one or two calls into the office at a time, SIP supports that.”   Additionally, PRI and T1 lines are expensive and may cost $450 to $600 per month.  For small businesses that are often in smaller cities or rural areas, communication costs can be on the high end of that range.  Using SIP trunking, you can move PBX traffic off of those lines and onto far less expensive carrier Ethernet.

There’s also savings to be had beyond access charges.  According to Wilson, with SIP trunking all of your voice calls and other UC traffic flow over your data network. Calls or sessions between internal company locations, therefore, ride only over your company’s own network, meaning they’re “on-net” calls. That means they aren’t subject to any per-minute charge and can result in big savings.

What Should SMBs Know About SIP Implementation

The transition to SIP should be relatively painless and “a lot comes down to what kind of PBX your company has today and whether you want to keep it or whether it is time for an upgrade,” says Wilson.  For businesses that have an IP-PBX or are planning on moving to a cloud PBX, the transition is a lot easier.  If there is an older analog PBX in place it is still straightforward, but they will need to put a translation appliance (Internet Access Device – IAD) in place to translate the analog calls to digital and vice versa.  Either way, the goal is to accomplish the whole transition as seamlessly as possible.

Once the approach is defined, the next step is routing the company’s existing phone numbers to the SIP provider’s trunks.  “In our situation this is all done via an online portal so the company can easily provision the IP PBX or IAD and connect the lines up to our trunks,” says Wilson.  Once this is complete and tested, the rest of the heavy lifting is done by the SIP provider.  “If done properly, employees shouldn’t even notice a difference.”

NOTE:  Many small businesses implementing SIP may also be moving their real time communications to an IP network for the first time.  If this is the case, they should assess their local area network and bandwidth capacity in detail before pulling the trigger.  For more details on what should be taken into consideration (including phones that might not be IP-ready), check out this post.  

The post Why Small Businesses Should Switch to SIP Trunks appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Over and over at The UC Buyer we have heard that one of the biggest risks to Cloud-based UC is a corporate network that is not up for the job.  In this detailed podcast with Stephen Farkouh, the Executive Vice President of Information Systems at UCaaS solution provider Broadview Networks, we discuss the network challenges that businesses face when deploying UCaaS and what they can do to prevent them.

We talk about  jitter and latency and their causes including router configurations, firewall setup and bandwidth.  We also dive into their new solution allows their channel partners to perform an in-depth, long-term pre-test of a company’s network that identifies any issues up front so they can be addressed before pulling the trigger on UCaaS deployment.  If you’re considering cloud-UC, you definitely should take a listen.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcasts at iTunes or via RSS (they’re great for the drive to or from work!)  and stick with The UC Buyer for best practices around moving your communications to the cloud.

The post Testing the Readiness of Your Network Prior to UCaaS Deployment appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Companies are moving towards Network Function Virtualization (NFV) in a big way.  NFV is an initiative undertaken by companies and communications service providers (CSPs) to virtualize the network services that are now being carried out by proprietary, dedicated hardware.  As businesses successfully adopt NFV they will decrease the amount of proprietary hardware that’s needed to launch and operate network services.  Businesses are looking to NFV to deliver a number of benefits, including operational savings, lower CapEx costs, increased agility and flexibility to scale.  

When it comes to the communications stack there are a number of capabilities that are moving towards NFV and the cloud at breakneck speed, from telephony and PBX’s, to UC to video conferencing.  One concept that has been gathering a lot of attention on the NFV-front is virtualizing session border controllers.  SBCs have traditionally been deployed on purpose-built hardware with custom DSP’s that are designed to excel at the sophisticated security and interoperability functions that SBCs provide, so they are an obvious NFV target, yet they also present certain challenges.  

According to Walter Kenrich, the Director of Product Marketing at Sonus Networks, simply porting an application to a virtual machine, especially one as sophisticated as a SBC, doesn’t mean it will work in the cloud.  “There is a lot of “myth vs reality” out there when it comes to Virtual SBC options,” says Kenrich.  “Companies are obviously concerned about security in cloud communications, as well as insuring interworking and scalability – especially when an SBC is being deployed on a COTS (Common Off The Shelf) server.”   The thought being that as the optimized hardware disappears, the standard hardware could have difficulty keeping up with heavy interworking and media processing requirements.  However, according to Kenrich, “As the technology has been tested and improved, these areas have been addressed and effectively overcome, especially when businesses and services providers deploy orchestration software, like OpenStack, to manage their virtual communications services.”  (NOTE: In a previous article we discussed some of these media processing challenges…keep your eyes open for a post updating how this is being addressed) .

Three Models for Deploying Virtual or Cloud Based Session Border Controllers

As Session Border Controller vendors like Sonus have been working to optimize their virtual SBC offerings, businesses and service providers have been busy deploying vSBCs in a variety of ways.  Here are three that, according to Kenrich, have been gaining the most traction to date:

On-Premise (CPE) Virtual Session Border Controller for Enterprises

Pretty straight forward.  An enterprise owns and manages their own virtual SBC in their own public, private or hybrid cloud environment.  SIP trunks come in and the customer has their own orchestration built in.  Using COTS servers, the enterprise deploys a virtual SBC and enables it to be managed as an application module by their orchestration software.  Simple, right?  I mean, if you consider setting up that kind of thing ‘pretty straightforward’.  

According to Kenrich, businesses taking advantage of a solution like this are looking to retain control of their environment while lowering costs.  “Having a virtual SBC in place allows enterprises that are already comfortable managing session border controllers to spin up or down additional resources as necessary to support peak loads or busy times of the year,” says Kenrich.

Virtual SBC is On-Premise, But is Managed By Service Provider

This situation is ideal for businesses that are looking to maintain control of their own cloud environment but may not have the internal expertise to manage the details of a session border controller environment.  The service provider delivers all services around the SBC and can even handle the scaling up and down of capacity because they would have access to their client’s orchestration layer.

Kenrich indicated that this model is gaining traction with larger Tier One service providers.  “These firms are looking to provide as much network management (via NFV) as possible for their clients,” says Kenrich.  “In addition to real time communications applications like SBCs, policy routing engines (PSX) and element management systems (EMS), these service providers are even looking to handle applications like firewalls and other traditionally networking-focused capabilities”

SBCaaS – Solution Resides on Service Provider’s Cloud

In this instance, the service provider handles all aspects of delivering SBC capabilities as a service from their own cloud.  Customers eliminate all hardware requirements and rely on the CSP for setup and management, software upgrades and network configuration and security for their SBC instance.  “In this scenario, service providers have their own orchestration software which allows them to adapt to identified traffic spikes,” says Kenrich.  “They can utilize load balancing across instances to elastically react and can even take advantage of analytics to do so dynamically and proactively.”  Just like every other area of computing, expect to see more businesses providing as-a-service offerings for SBCs.  

And stay tuned for a post digging into the details about how the challenge of scaling interworking and media processing on vSBCs is being addressed.

The post Virtual SBC and SBCaaS Options: The Market is Coming Into Focus appeared first on The UC Buyer.

If you’ve been following The UC Buyer, or you’ve just heard the incessant buzzing sound coming from the marketplace, you’ll know the business world is moving towards a Customer Experience Management (CEM) mindset. For many companies this represents a shift to an omni-channel contact center and a fundamental change in their approach to customer care.  As a colleague recently explained, it can be neatly summed up as a company’s migration from an ‘inside out’ to an ‘outside in’ approach. Businesses that have successfully made this transition have customer care as a core aspect of their brand and see this company-wide approach as a competitive differentiator.

According to Mike Burke, the Director of Product Marketing for contact center solutions at IR, a “company’s brand is a promise that sets expectations for all interactions your customers have with your company.” (Great line Mike…mind if I ‘borrow’ that one going forward?) As Burke continued, “The omni-channel customer experience is driving companies to deliver seamless, effective customer experiences, regardless of the channel chosen.”

That means that to deliver this premium experience your employees have to be on-board and engaged and every piece of technology has to help keep this promise. In a nutshell, the tech needs to work.

Monitor Your Communication Network to Minimize Downtime and Keep Customers Connected

Between VoIP, Unified Communications, and video the pressure on the communications layer of a corporate network has never been greater. Add in multiple additional channels like web chat, WebRTC, SMS, self-service and IVR, web conferencing and screen sharing – not to mention all of the endpoint devices, routers, switches, cables and applications – and there are too many potential failure points to shake a stick at.

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Dig Deeper to Ensure the Ultimate Customer Experience:  Download the eBook – 4 Keys to eContact Center Success

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“With the mission critical aspect of real-time communications, businesses need to ensure their infrastructure and network is working from end to end,” says Burke. As we’ve covered here in the past, performance management solutions, like IR’s Prognosis platform, manage the entire communications backbone (minus the portion of it going over the provider’s network) and helps find the needle causing problems amongst the many haystacks described above. This helps companies be proactive in avoiding problems, optimizing their ecosystem and getting aligned with[KF2]  the business about delivering better services.

When it comes to delivering on the promise of customer experience management, this ongoing performance management can help identify and address problems hours or even days early, and this can mean avoiding thousands of potentially unhappy customers. “A breakdown can be at any level, from cornerstone applications like an SBC all the way down to cabling and individual phones or headsets,” says Burke. “The key is to quickly and proactively identify and isolate the issue, so it can be solved, employees aren’t impacted, customers are happy and it doesn’t negatively impact the bottom line.“

Leverage Active Testing to Keep Contact Center Channels Running

Back in the days of yore, when phone-only contact centers reigned supreme, keeping up with new technology meant an occasional dot-level software update and an even more occasional version upgrade. Nowadays, things aren’t that simple. Now you have phones, web apps, mobile apps, chat, SMS, email, WebRTC, Unified Communications and even video to pay attention to.  Staying in front of that takes a more active approach. And it also means acting like a human.

“When it comes to active testing, it is important to define what customers need or want to do when they interact with you across the various different channels,” says Burke.  Active testing means setting up programs that will kick off real phone calls and real web interactions and then measure response times, measure responses and act like real people doing real things.  “With active testing solutions we are looking to ensure that if a customer is trying to do something, the application and connection is available, functioning properly and performing the way it is supposed to be.” I discussed two active testing approaches with Burke:

Stress and Load Testing to Guarantee a Smooth Rollout

Often associated with an event, like the launch of a new application, in anticipation of a high-traffic calendar date (like Storm Season, Black Friday, or Tax Day, depending on industry), or the updating of an existing system, stress and load testing puts your system and application through its paces. As Burke explained, “With so many additional mission-critical applications to care for, making sure your system can handle a flood of traffic before going live can make the difference between a smooth roll-out and a disaster.”

HeartBeat Testing for Channel Availability Assurance

This is active testing on an ongoing basis. Instead of slamming a system to understand exactly how it performs under maximum load, heartbeat testing interacts with various channels, web apps and phone systems on an ongoing basis – say every five minutes. Again, interacting with the system in the same way a human would, this type of ongoing testing makes sure each channel is always available, doing what it is supposed to do and is consistently doing it well.

With so much riding on such sophisticated communications systems, it is no wonder so many organizations are turning to performance management solutions like these. As Burke summed things up, “It is not enough to be reactive, especially when it can take hours or days to identify and isolate a problem. Businesses need ongoing performance management and active testing solutions to ferret out issues with their technology that would otherwise be hidden. Then they can proactively do something about it before the spark turns into a conflagration.”

The post The Vital Role Monitoring and Testing Plays in Successful Omni-Channel Contact Centers appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Is Your Local Area Network Ready for UCaaS?

When switching to over-the-top communications solutions like UCaaS, issues related to the company’s Local Area Network are likely to present the greatest potential risk to perceived success.  “For many SMB’s, having mission critical voice and video traffic go through the LAN is a new experience,” says Aldo Ramirez, VP of Sales at ANPI and veteran of hundreds of hosted communications deployments, “and it is important to take the time to make sure the LAN is bullet proof prior to making the move as that is where quality issues – like jitter or dropped calls – are most likely to arise.”  Ramirez suggests looking at three areas to start:

Routers: Several things need to be looked into when it comes to routers.  “First is it a VoIP enabled router that allows you to set QoS (Quality of Service) for the voice traffic?  Are you able to adjust the SIP ALG setting?  These are yes or no questions, but for many SMBs this is something they have never had to consider before,” says Ramirez.  As we’ve covered in the past, a lot of smaller businesses have consumer grade routers which have historically been good enough for their needs but may very well require an upgrade to ensure a UCaaS deployment will be successful.

Switches:  Does your company have an enterprise-grade switch that the IT team can get into and manage?  Will you be providing a port for each phone and delivering Power Over Ethernet (POE) to power the phones?  If not, do you have enough power outlets to power the IP phones?  Will you be implementing a dual drop scenario?  As we’ve discussed previously, the hardware setup can make all the difference in providing quality of service and streamlining deployment and management:

[With a dual drop] the data network has its own port on the switch and the phones have their own port.  According to Mann, “If you separate it out this way, you can easily prioritize the voice and conferencing packets and you are in a better position to deliver a quality experience to your team.” Another way to think about the importance of packet prioritization is, would you rather wait a few extra seconds for your email to show up or experience jitter on twenty percent of your phone calls?  Having the right hardware to prioritize communications packets is critical.

Firewall Settings:  Are your firewall settings (i.e. UDP) allowing enough time for VoIP traffic to pass through it?  Are you setting up NAT (Network Address Translations) in your firewall?  Session Border Controllers are part of most UCaaS offerings and provide communications-layer security, but you definitely don’t want your firewall working against you.

Are you Covered When it Comes to Network Bandwidth and Redundancy

When it comes to voice traffic, bandwidth is another area to properly assess.  We’ve talked about the 6 to 1 rule (for every 6 employees, 1 will be on the phone at any given time).  Another good rule of thumb is 100K per call for toll quality service.  “If you have 25 people in your company, the worst case scenario is that you have 25 people on the phone at the same time.  Most companies have 2.5MB of bandwidth coming into their business, and as long as you have enough room for your data traffic on top of that you are all set.”  Video conferencing traffic is another consideration as that eats up significantly more bandwidth.  But as Ramirez points out, “Bandwidth is relatively inexpensive and readily available nowadays.  A more important issue may be having a backup bandwidth provider in case the primary circuit goes down with a storm or an accident.  Having a cable backup for $80 a month that you can roll over to can feel like the best money you’ve ever spent if it keeps your company running during a disaster.”

How is Inside Wiring Set Up and Is it Ready for VoIP / UCaaS?

If your business already has a VoIP phone system, you probably already have Cat5 cable going to each desk for the phones.  If not, you are going to need to do some wiring to deploy UCaaS.  “Don’t plan on running your system over Wifi,” say Ramirez, “the quality of service will suffer and most phones are not Wifi enabled.  To have a successful UCaaS/VoIP solution requires Cat5+ cabling to the desks.”

Additional considerations would be setting up single or double drops (i.e. will you have one cable for your computer and one for the phone), or are you daisy chaining them together.  If you are planning on deploying the ‘dual drop’ scenario discussed above with a different port on the switch for each network, having double drops is a necessity.  Another issue to be aware of is whether your network is 10/100 MB or GigE.  “Most phones do not support Gigabit ethernet and are designed for 10/100.  This needs to be clearly defined during the design phase, or there will be some seriously unhappy people.”

Do you Have Special Requirements?

Before deploying UCaaS it is also vital to define any special requirements that need to be taken into consideration.  These can include things like a system a business uses for music on hold that they have been using for years and is how they manage company advertisements and messaging.  “A solution like this may be digital or analog, but as far as the company is concerned, it is not going anywhere so it needs to be integrated into the new system.  Getting in front of this and coming up with a solution can make or break a project,” says Ramirez.

The same thing can be said about overhead paging systems or an exterior door release system that is activated via the phones.  A company may have an existing solution, hardwired through the building with multiple zones and is part of how they do business.  Going through a discovery process, determining whether it is SIP, analog or IP and then integrating it into the system and thoroughly testing it becomes a very important part of the project’s critical path.

Do you Have Key System Emulations Requirements

Many people reading this that are older than 35 probably worked in a company with a Key system.  These were the phones that you could see a button for all of the lines in the company, and when you got a call someone yelled out to you (or intercom’d you) and said, “Call for you on line 4”.  “There are still a lot of companies out there that are using these types of phones and that methodology is a big part of how they do business.  If you are one of them, it is important to define what aspects of your process you are willing to modify, what can be emulated with the UCaaS system and what are deal breakers,” says Ramirez.

UCaaS systems are flexible, can be prepared to work in a variety of different ways and can emulate much of a key systems functionality, but they cannot do it all because they are fundamentally different solutions (ie. there are no ‘lines’ with UCaaS).    The good news is, most businesses don’t need to worry about this.

Stay tuned to the UC Buyer for another 5 questions coming soon.

The post 5 Questions SMBs Must Ask And Answer Before Implementing UCaaS or Hosted VoIP appeared first on The UC Buyer.

That was my first thought when I saw an advertisement for a recent LightReading webinar called “Multi-layer Security for Real-time Communications.” Sponsored by Sonus and featuring Walter Kenrich, Sonus’ Director of Product management, the webinar makes the case that securing RTC environments is best accomplished by using a multi-layer strategy that includes firewalls, session border controllers and software defined network (SDN) components all working in tandem.

The concept is somewhat different from the traditional defense in depth strategy, which basically says if an intruder gets by a perimeter defense mechanism, there should be another deeper inside the network to stop him. The multi-layer approach that Sonus and Kenrich espouse does attempt to push security as far to the perimeter of the network as possible, but it also envisions SBCs, firewalls and SDN policy engines each doing what they do best while sharing information in order to thwart various sorts of attacks.

Detecting Toll Fraud with SBCs, Firewalls and SDN Controllers

One example is how the plan would work in detecting attempted toll fraud using IP address spoofing. Toll fraud, Kenrich noted, is now practiced by cyber criminals looking to steal international call minutes potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and sell them to unwitting service providers or consumers.

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Dig Deeper:  Download the Free E-Book Session Border Controllers (SBCs) for Dummies

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The criminals use commonly available scanning tools to find open ports, then spoof a legitimate IP address to try to gain access through the firewall. When there’s an SBC sitting behind the firewall, the attempt would then be routed to the SBC before a call could be initiated. The SBC would ask the policy routing engine where to send the call. Perhaps the business does some amount of business in Africa, so the policy is to let a small number of calls go through to African countries – a common destination for toll fraud perpetrators. So maybe that first call goes through successfully.

Once the intruder finds that opening, he figures the intrusion is on and starts sending lots more calls to Africa. At this point, the policy engine will detect the high number of calls, suspect fraud and tell the SBC not to accept any more calls. “It will just shut down that service,” Kenrich says. Since the goal is always to stop the security threat at the furthest edge of the network, the SBC will then tell the firewall to block any more connections from that IP address, thus subverting any additional attacks.

How Virtual SBCs and SDN Controllers can Thwart DOS Attacks

Another example is using a virtual Session Border Controller (SBC) integrated with an SDN to provide security to cloud-based services, such as thwarting a denial of service (DOS) attack. Inside the cloud provider’s network, the virtual SBC would be able to detect a DOS attack by its registration credentials. To stop the attack at the farthest edge of the network, the SBC communicates with the SDN controller. The controller could then modify its packet forwarding rules at the edge of the network to stop the attack. What’s more, white lists could be used to ensure authorized users get through, Kenrich notes.

The hour-long webinar goes into greater detail on exactly how these concepts play out in practice –it’s worth a look. As an extension of the tried and true defense in depth strategy, I’d say the multi-layered security strategy looks to be an effective way for enterprises and service providers to combat the threats that RTC flows face.

The post Multi-layer Security: An Effective Strategy for Protecting Real-time Communications Flows from a Variety of Threats appeared first on The UC Buyer.

As regular followers of The UC Buyer know, we love sharing the latest on how organizations are using communications technology to improve and grow their businesses. One area that many companies are especially interested in is video collaboration – and particularly in enterprise-scale video projects. To delve into the current state of enterprise video collaboration, I recently spoke with Joe Arena, Senior Vice President of Advanced Services at Yorktel – you can hear the whole podcast interview here.

For those who aren’t aware, Yorktel is a leading business in enterprise video implementation and management.  With more than 10,000 systems under management worldwide, they partner with some of the largest businesses and government agencies around the globe. I wanted to know from an industry expert how organizations can take full advantage of video collaboration, and make it work best for their business. In particular I wanted to understand what it really takes to assess the needs and to implement a successful enterprise-quality video collaboration project from start to finish.

First Step: Perform a Detailed Video Conferencing and Collaboration Assessment

To be clear, I recognize that video conferencing has been happening for decades with varying degrees of success. However, many projects that set out to offer seamless and high-quality video collaboration across the enterprise fall well short of the mark. So, what does it really take for businesses to succeed in providing the platform, tools and user experience that this valuable medium promises? Joe explained that executing on an accurate and detailed assessment project as a first step is a crucial component that’s often overlooked.

The process of performing a detailed video collaboration needs assessment involves many steps, as well as understanding the answers to some critical questions. These include:

Understanding the user community. You need to identify the stakeholders who will be using the video service, and how they will be collaborating. Video users from different departments and with different needs will undoubtedly use the service differently. For this reason it is recommended that the assessment be used to identify the various employee needs, and create a user persona map detailing the results.

Know where your video collaborators are located. Will the service be used by remote workers and those working from home? Will it be used by sales staff from the road? The answer to these questions will help determine the type of client and connections required. 

Define platforms and tools. Will users be connecting from their laptops and desktops? From their mobile devices? What role does unified communications and collaboration software currently play in the enterprise?  Video conferencing has traditionally been a conference room experience, but with all of the technology available today, people are jumping on from all over the place on various devices and expect to have great functionality beyond the conference room.

Consider the backend service and infrastructure. Will the video conferencing platform be run on premise, or as a cloud service? There are advantages and disadvantages to each, and the factors that go into making this decision involve careful consideration of the existing capabilities.

Consider the network. Along with the server and data center capabilities, the capacity of the network must be given careful consideration. In order to provide a high-quality user experience, the network must be able to handle a sufficient number of concurrent video connections.

Understand the support model. The question of how video conferencing will be supported within the company is another often overlooked issue. Will there be dedicated helpdesk and support personnel? How about training for the users of the service? Connected to the support model is the necessity of the IT team proactively monitoring performance and maintaining the infrastructure and the network.

The Output of a Video Assessment Project

So what should a company expect to come out of a video assessment? Joe walked me through the result, which should include the following at a minimum:

A business case or quantification of needs. In the past this may have been something like financial justification achieved through reducing travel expenses. Today this is more about people being able to collaborate anywhere, at any time. This is now far more about increasing productivity than it is about saving a one-time expense.

An understanding of whether and how existing technology can be leveraged. Where are we today, what tools and software do we have and will we be starting from scratch or building upon an existing video collaboration or UC platform?

User experience assessment. What are the conference-room locations like? Are they conducive to video collaboration? What about huddle rooms?  Are locations and experiences throughout the organization consistent? What do we need to deliver to home workers to make their experience seamless and powerful.

With so much riding on the output of a video conferencing implementation, it is critical to start with a solid plan.  I’d like to thank Joe for his insights into some of the best practices Yorktel helps their clients address.  It is definitely worth a listen the whole way through!  What about your business?  Are there additional areas you feel like you need to address or have included in your video planning efforts?  Let us know in the comments section below.

The post Components of Enterprise Video Assessment Projects and a Roadmap for a Successful Video Implementation appeared first on The UC Buyer.

CafeX won Best in Show at Enterprise Connect for their just-announced product, Chime. Chime is a product that looks to bring the simplicity of WebRTC to enterprise video, which it does with some pretty fancy technological footwork.  In this interview with Sajeel Hussain, the Chief Marketing Officer at CafeX, we dig into the challenges inhibiting WebRTC adoption and the many issues keeping enterprise video conferencing from achieving the simplicity and quality that users demand.

We discuss how CafeX is addressing ease-of-use issues, transcoding challenges, reducing network demand and simplifying the complex architecture of video deployments.  If you are interested in making video a centerpiece of the way your organization works, this is a must listen.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcasts at iTunes (they’re great for the drive to work!) and stick with The UC Buyer for on-going insights into the way the communications and collaboration landscape is evolving. 

The post Addressing Some Of Video’s Biggest Challenges in the Enterprise. Podcast Interview with CafeX appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Every successful tech project I’ve ever worked on starts with an assessment to get the lay of the land in order to develop an effective plan of attack.  In this insight-filled interview with Joe Arena, the Senior Vice President of Advanced Services at video managed service provider Yorktel, we dig into what a video communications assessment project looks like, the components businesses should take into consideration when performing an assessment and how to take remote workers and external stakeholders into consideration when planning your approach.

We also discuss the components – such as networking, user experience, conference room upgrades and software consolidation – that are a part of most video execution projects.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcasts at iTunes (they’re great for the drive to work!) and stick with The UC Buyer for on-going insights into the way the communications and collaboration landscape is evolving. 

The post What it Takes to Deliver on the Promise of Enterprise Video Communication and Collaboration appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Listen to this fascinating discussion with Chip Pickering, CEO of INCOMPAS (formerly COMPTEL), the industry association representing communications and technology companies large and small, advocating for laws and policies that promote competition, innovation and economic development.  We discuss how the association has evolved to stay relevant in this hyper-evolving communications landscape, the way new technologies and business models are impacting the financial landscape for traditional networks and carriers, and how content providers like Twitter, Facebook and Amazon are participating and playing a role in growing the marketplace and promoting competition.

We also dig into the legislative and regulatory activities the association is focused on and what is happening within the FCC and Congress that is impacting the communications and internet industries.  If you are interested in where the marketplace is headed and what the playing field looks like, this podcast is a must listen.  If you want to learn more and get involved with INCOMPAS, register for their upcoming event in Washington, D.C. from April 10 – 13.

My thanks to Chip for his time and insights.  Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcasts at iTunes (they’re great for the drive to work!) and stick with The UC Buyer for on-going insights into the way the communications and connectivity landscape is evolving. 

The post The Future Voice of Competition in the Internet Era – Podcast Interview with INCOMPAS appeared first on The UC Buyer.