 | |||||||||||||
|
|
 |
February 13, 2006 By Dan Massiello Just five years ago, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) was anything but mainstream. Today, players like Vonage and Skype are household names and on the corporate front, organizations of all sizes are taking advantage of VoIP. In fact, the largest trend in audio and web conferencing for all applications, including remote learning, is the move to VoIP. As enterprise-level adoption rates rise and remote collaboration becomes more and more commonplace, the looming question is security. The biggest issue is exposure of an organization's private data to uninvited visitors. Audio and web collaboration enables documents, creative concepts, lessons and detailed illustrations to be passed seamlessly across the country. But are these connections unknowingly exposing an organization to security threats through this common business interaction? It's an important question that every organization should consider before engaging with an audio and web collaboration provider for its distance learning needs. The first choice any company selecting a provider is faced with is "hosted" or "premises-based?" In the past, hosted options — providers who offer collaboration as a web-based, pay-per-use service — were considered desirable because they assumed the burden of implementing and managing the conferencing infrastructure. However, as remote learning becomes more critical to business operations, companies have begun to scrutinize two obvious shortcomings of the service-based approach: cost and security. Conferencing service providers extract large recurring fees that don't scale well with increasing usage. For a cost less than a few months' service fees, premises-based equipment can be purchased and installed, eliminating monthly fees and removing the barriers to providing the benefit to larger user communities. Perhaps more importantly though, a hosted provider's approach offers far less security than premises-based solutions, especially for intra-organization communications, which comprises most collaboration and remote learning activities. In these cases, premises-based solutions maintain learning material and user information within an organization's network, never exposing it to the more risky frontier of the Internet at large — and allowing it to be managed by the same documented network security standards governing the rest of the company's mission-critical business applications. It's also important to consider that security and privacy threats are not just from the outside. Most organizations use collaboration and conferencing to discuss sensitive internal matters as well. Remote collaboration security must comprehend more than just the vulnerability of the transfer mechanisms. Attendance must also be carefully managed, by using such security features as passwords and unique identifiers (PINs) for each attendee. Systems should also have audible and visual cues to announce the comings and goings of participants. Reflecting the growing consciousness of cost and security issues, organizations are shifting from hosted solutions to premises-based solutions. With conferencing becoming an integral part of an organization's remote learning structure, these entities cannot afford to select a provider that cannot guarantee web and audio security. To ensure your organization gets the level of security needed, the following questions should be asked to any web-based collaboration provider:
Remote learning has changed how we do business, allowing us to collaborate and educate in an effective and secure manner not possible just a few years ago. Dan Massiello is president and CEO of Sonexis Inc., developer of a premises-based, integrated audio and web conferencing system located in Tewksbury. |
|
|
|
| Product Information | Customer Care | Partners | About Sonexis | Contact Us | Visit Compunetix | Sonexis Blog | Site Map | Home |
|
Copyright © 2012 Sonexis Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy
phone: 888-476-6394 | fax: 978-640-2300 | email: info@sonexis.com |
