The UK’s SMEs are increasingly using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) in order to cut call costs. Alongside cloud computing, VoIP is a key component in today’s flexible, low cost infrastructure that is supporting business agility and growth. Yet while businesses are increasingly confident to deploy these technologies, too many may be unaware of, or fully appreciate the associated risks.
Paul German, founder and CEO, VoipSec, comments: “VoIP is not just a lower cost telephone system; it uses the Internet data connection to provide a voice service - and should be treated as such in terms of security and usage policies. Deploying VoIP without considering the security implications leaves the door wide open onto the server, which is used to host the VoIP service, and a fundamentally compromised business infrastructure.
“Moreover, it leaves the SME open to the significant risk of call-jacking or ‘toll fraud’, which currently costs UK businesses around £0.78 billion* each year, and could therefore have a huge impact on a business’ financial stability.”
Traditional VoIP security models have required a dedicated – and therefore expensive - hardware implementation of a Session Border Controller (SBC) to act as the voice firewall; this has led to a complex cost / benefit equation in which the risk associated with unsecure VoIP communication has largely been downplayed.
German adds: “Once the voice firewall is in place, an SME has the foundation for the multi-layered security model required for every aspect of the infrastructure, including voice. This includes determining how VoIP should be used, what polices should be implemented to improve control over the environment and deploying application level security to implement these policies quickly and effectively. Essentially, the voice firewall is the foundation for the defense-in-depth model that has been applied to secure data networks over the last decade.”
He concludes: “VoIP is hugely compelling and with the rise in excellent broadband connections, growing numbers of SMEs will opt for this low cost approach. However, any Internet related deployment demands security – and it is only by applying the same level of rigour to voice security that has become standard practice across data networks that SMEs will truly gain the value of VoIP without running the risks of business damaging breaches or call jacking.”