Memphis Communications Corporation: Memphis Telecom Systems

Friday, 22 August 2014

Using VoIP for Enterprise Security - MCC’s Telecom Division

Voice over IP (VoIP) provides businesses with lower cost calling, more powerful and robust private branch exchange functionality, and the ability to add numerous value-added services to basic calling. Tools and techniques exist for using VoIP to enhance enterprise security, including call recording, voice biometrics, and voice analytics.

Call recording is the most basic VoIP service to support enterprise security. Businesses with regulatory compliance needs (such as financial, legal, and health care) record all calls made on company phones, including mobile devices. Vendors in this space sometimes refer to call recording as voice documentation because it provides a complete electronic record of what is said between parties during phone calls. In legal disputes, call recording can provide evidence that best practices and proper procedures are followed.

Voice biometrics provide a layer of security to authenticate individuals. Avaya, NICE Systems, and others provide solutions that are used for basic authentication during call center transactions, securing applications and transactions, and mobile applications. Using voice also provides the ability to replace personal identification numbers, passwords, and challenge questions with a faster method of authentication, saving time for customers and businesses while providing better security. Financial institutions such as Barclays, Banco Santander Mexico, and U.S. Bank all use voice biometrics to provide secure customer authentication.

Businesses and organizations can use voice biometrics to provide authentication to field service personnel interacting with a dispatch center and other daily communications where there is potential for a third party to gain access to internal business processes through social engineering. An attacker will call into an organization posing as a company employee and use a series of techniques to build trust and gather information on a target. Voice biometrics can be used to provide an automated gatekeeper function to screen inbound and in-house calls for bad actors.

In combination with call recording and voice biometrics, voice analytics can provide in-depth defense against social engineering attacks. Traditionally, voice analytics has been used as a big data–style application to monitor call center performance, gauge the success of new products, and provide competitive intelligence through the ability to look for key words and phrases. Existing processes can be tuned to look for social engineering attacks phishing for passwords and other sensitive information as a part of the nightly and weekly analytics batch runs.

Once an attack instance has been identified, the attacker’s voice biometric information can be identified and used to search through the archive of daily calls for other instances to build a picture of the type of information being sought and what departments are being targeted. The voiceprint then can be incorporated into blacklist processes to flag and block calls from an identified attacker. Other information can be gleaned from the characteristics of the calls themselves, including length of call, time of day calls are made, and the IP address of origin if it’s VoIP from end to end.

Until recently, call recording and voice biometrics have only been available as dedicated solutions. Cloud-based services are now making recording and biometrics both more available and more affordable than expensive solutions tailored to large call centers with a substantial number of calls per hour. Voice analytics is becoming an option for cloud-based call center offerings, but the effectiveness of the technology as a security measure is dependent upon being able to process through all calls within the business. If limited to the call center, voice analytics will not catch attackers calling to internal extensions while posing as employees.

Voice technology being rolled out this year will enable real-time machine actions to be triggered on key words or phrases, speeding up the process of identifying an attack. A request for a password during a phone call could send an immediate text or e-mail message or bring in the IT security desk to monitor the call as it takes place.

None of these solutions are magic bullets to prevent security breaches. Instead, view them as potential components of a holistic security plan. Determined attackers will figure out ways around security schemes, so the objective within a larger enterprise security plan is to provide as many barriers to entry as possible to deter break-in attempts.

Contact MCC’s Telecom Division today to learn more about VoIP and how it can benefit your organization!

- See more at: http://www.memphiscommunications.net/blog/#sthash.JvYYAW0F.dpuf

For more details please contact us at:

Memphis Communications Corporation

4771 Summer Ave

Memphis, TN 38122

Tel: 901.725.9271

Fax: 901.272.3577

Toll Free: 866.805.5893

Service and Supplies: 901.257.2500

Email: sales@memphiscommunications.net

Website: http://www.memphiscommunications.net

Thursday, 14 August 2014

How VoIP can Transform your Business – MCC’s Telecom Solutions Division

Article from Jon Arnold, independent telecom analyst

During my most recent series, I focused on the opportunity presented by remote working, especially for SMBs looking to be more agile. Many of the long-standing obstacles have fallen away with today’s technologies, and remote working can have a transformative effect on your business. This was a key takeaway at the end of that series, and it’s leading me to examine the power of transformation more broadly for SMBs.

While remote working is mainly an operational decision, adopting VoIP is driven by technology and the need for IT to update the phone system. You can very easily let that frame the context for this decision, with VoIP being a simple solution to a basic problem. When your legacy phone system reaches end of life, a replacement is needed since everyone still needs to make calls.

There’s nothing wrong with that thinking, and it certainly was the basis for buying your last phone system. You can do the same this time around – after all, a phone system is just a phone system. At face value, VoIP is exactly that; it looks, feels and behaves just like TDM. Your employees won’t notice the difference, and it’s totally transparent to them.

Telephony has long been a utility with little strategic value to the business. Legacy telephony was pretty much an oligarchy where everyone had the same services and paid the same high prices. Innovation was not part of the equation and there was no competitive advantage to be had for businesses.

Are You Still Thinking This Way About Telephony?

If so, and if you’re happy doing that, there’s no point in reading further. VoIP initially emerged out of a demand for lower cost telephony, but the ultimate vision was never about replicating legacy service. The creators of VoIP – the Israeli military, by the way – recognized the potential of the Internet to be an alternate transport medium to the PSTN for voice traffic. This opened up a world of new possibilities for where and how telephony could be utilized, since users no longer needed to be tethered to a fixed wireline connection.

Furthermore, the service itself was based on the principals of legacy telephony, but using a fundamentally different set of standards and protocols. VoIP was developed from the outset with Internet-based tools, making it natively interoperable with other Internet-based communications modes. Unlike legacy telephony, VoIP was not built as an island, separate and independent from all the other modes we use all day long at work.

You don’t need a deep technical knowledge of VoIP’s inner workings to see how this changes the nature of telephony. For businesses that are striving for a competitive edge, any form of innovation must be considered, and that’s the plane where VoIP enters the conversation. Instead of viewing VoIP as telephony, you need to see it as a digital communications application that can be used wherever employees have access to broadband.

Think about what that means for liberating employees from their desks. Think about what that means for the need to centralize your staff for ease of proximity. Think about what that means for how you communicate with customers and support their needs. Think about workplace efficiencies that come from employees being more responsive and accessible, along with being less stressed from wasting time playing phone tag. Think about how the flexibility of IP communications empowers employees to embrace new technologies. Think about how VoIP lays the foundation to adopt new applications for even richer communications experiences.

To Break Through, You Must Break With

These are just a few examples of how VoIP is a first step towards moving beyond telephony. This is about thinking strategically instead of tactically. The underlying challenge is the fact that legacy telephony has not evolved for decades, so there has been little reason to think about it in new ways – despite the fact that the Internet has changed everything around us, and mobility is now the preferred way to communicate.

Breaking with an ossified way of thinking is essential for getting transformational value out of VoIP.

Replicating legacy service is easy, but offers no long term advantage. To get a break through, you have to look at VoIP with new eyes, and see it as a communications application rather than a new phone system. The breakthrough comes from seeing VoIP integrated with other communications modes, allowing employees to do new things in new ways – none of which would be possible by staying with legacy telephony.

Transformation doesn’t have to happen all at once, especially if you’re not ready for it. The beauty of VoIP is that you can take baby steps along this path, so the vision doesn’t have to all be there at the start. In fact, you won’t likely know what’s possible until you start using VoIP, and from there, it’s just a matter of how much transformation you want to make the business stronger. If you’re not sure what that could look like, I’ll provide some examples in my next post, so check back with me soon.

To learn more contact MCC’s Telecom Solutions Division today!

- See more at: http://memphiscommunications.net/blog/?p=1740#sthash.yl05aHdI.dpuf