Of course, smartphone ownership continues to grow. By the end of 2012, more than 50% of Canadian subscribers had a smartphone. Even more interesting is the rapid growth in tablet ownership, which quickly grew from sub-5% in 2011 to 20%+ in 2012.

And users appear to be getting more comfortable using the technology, with more people downloading applications for their smartphones and tablets. 70% of respondents are downloading applications. The average number of downloaded apps per device continues to sit at 12.

True to form, Canadians love talking about the weather and app use is no different – the #1 downloaded app type continues to be weather applications.

The forecast (pardon the pun) for the future of all this technology is clear – at the same time that consumers are arming themselves with more mobile technology and the knowledge required to leverage these devices, a Frost and Sullivan report released in January shows that mobile downloads of web meetings is growing rapidly – and is expected to double or triple in 2013 – with and expectation that ¼ of all online meetings incorporating video by the end of the year.

This trend was verified recently by IDC, who globally has seen a 32.8% year over year decline in large video infrastructure sales, but a 5% increase in personal videoconferencing solutions.

The shift in interest in traditional video conferencing to mobile video conferencing is also evident through analyzing changes in google trends:

Searches for Video Conferencing:

Searches for Mobile Video:

The bottom line is that the definition of mobile video conferencing is quickly moving from a cart on wheels to a smartphone app you can hold in your hand. Managing the transition to mobile video will be key to maintaining competitiveness for your business over the coming years. For more information on how Avaya handled our own transition to mobile enable video collaboration, check out the Wainhouse Research report here.

Posted 13 May 2013 at 10:32 AM

Article source: http://www.avaya.com/blogs/archives/2013/05/the-continued-consumerization-of-it.html

Unbehagen: People are talking about SDN as if it were a new thing. It may be in the news, but it’s not new. In fact, the concept of separating and abstracting the different elements of network in order to manage it more easily and more powerfully – that’s been around for at least 20 years.

Take Asynchronous Transfer Mode, or ATM. Every time you create a Permanent Virtual Circuit (PVC) in ATM, you’re asking a controller to automatically build a path from one location to another by enabling it on every switch that the packets travel through. That’s the same concept as today’s SDN. Every optical network around today also uses a form of SDN. So do wireless LANs.

When you take a step back, you see that SDN, perhaps under another name, is something the industry has been doing for many, many years. Now, we’re applying it in new ways. Ultimately, true automation and virtualization will come from marrying the abilities of a network controller with the fabric. This will provide a whole new level of flexibility in data center design and operations.

What about OpenFlow?

Turner: A lot of people are equating OpenFlow with SDN, when the latter is a broad umbrella concept. It’s like calling all smartphones ‘iPhone’ devices, or all soda drinks ‘Coke.’ Some proponents are also championing OpenFlow as the great solution for the enterprise. It isn’t.

OpenFlow’s claim to fame today is that it gives network admins a programming interface so they can reprogram and override what their routers and switches do today. While all enterprises have programmers, rarely do they employ network programmers. Most never have and never will. Also, your router already knows how to optimize network traffic paths better than a network admin ever will. Most importantly, enterprises want solutions that automate network management, not add complexity. OpenFlow’s programming interface just gives enterprises one more potential problem to solve.

So what is Avaya doing in SDN today?

Unbehagen: We’re working on a technology called Shortest Path Bridging. We’ve imbued our latest generation of switches and routers with an enhanced and extended version of SPB, which we call Fabric Connect. Whatever you call it, it is an evolutionary leap forward because it lets you completely virtualize both the networking and forwarding in your data center or private cloud. This makes the physical layout of your network irrelevant, as you can build any logical network on top. It does to the network, what virtual machines did to the server.

There is far less operational overhead in a Fabric Connect environment than a traditional network, but an order of magnitude more functionality. When you have Fabric Connect-enabled Ethernet everywhere, you can do some pretty interesting things: high-performance cut-through and store-and-forward models of traffic switching, virtualization of network connectivity, migration of Virtual Machines anytime, anywhere, and more.

Moreover, we are making FabricConnect work with an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) technology called OpenStack that is solving real-world problems for data centers today.

What’s OpenStack and how specifically are we integrated with them today?

Unbehagen: OpenStack was created by NASA and Rackspace to solve arguably the Number One problem in data centers today: simplifying the creation and movement of applications and virtual machines in a public or private cloud. Traditional methods of configuring a network, storage and virtualized servers could take months and involve several complicated, independent steps. OpenStack integrates several layers of modules that manage each step individually, but combines them all into a single automated interface. An administrator wants to say, “I need 15 machines with this much CPU and RAM, and this networking setup.” And that’s it. No network, compute or storage admins have to get involved because OpenStack creates the VMs and all its necessary resources for them in the background.

Networking remains the sole pain point for OpenStack users. For example, OpenStack only lets you move virtual machines in the same subnet, IP attachment and VLANs today, and the number of Virtual LANs is limited to 4,096.

We’re integrating FabricConnect with OpenStack’s ‘Quantum’ project. Now, network administrators can have complete flexibility to move their resources around the network. That is true network virtualization, with flexibility and scale while maintaining the simplicity of Ethernet.

You said OpenStack is a real-world enterprise issue today.

Unbehagen: There are many medium to large enterprises that have been deploying OpenStack all over the world for the past several years. I recently met a number of customers using OpenStack who are deploying Avaya Fabric Connect because of the simplicity it provides. They were keenly interested in how we are deploying SPB into OpenStack because, they said, they really love both. These are government agencies, financial services, data center hosting companies, and healthcare institutions.
 
At Interop this week, we plan to demonstrate that our FabricConnect technology interoperates with SPB-based products from Alcatel-Lucent, HP and Spirent. And I know of a few other vendors planning to release SPB-based products later this year.

Besides SPB and OpenStack, where else is SDN headed?

Unbehagen: There are many, many efforts under the umbrella of SDN that are very interesting. OpenDaylight, for one, has a lot of promise. In the IETF, there is something called Network Virtualization Overlays (nvo3). This is about making it easier for virtualized applications to move around the IP network. There’s also Interface to the Routing System (i2rs), which is intended to boost intelligent communication with existing routing protocols to ensure better scale and better stability. SDN can still go in many different directions. Nothing’s set in stone.
 
I do think SDN is a bit of misnomer. Every piece of hardware, every switch and every router, already runs on software. They are already software-defined. Ultimately, I think SDN needs to evolve and become aware of the applications on the network so that you’re managing and improving their usability. That’s why we prefer the term Application-Driven Networking (ADN).

Avaya is one of few companies that can actually pursue an ADN strategy because we deliver from one end of the stack to another.  We make the software that goes on a tablet or smartphone, as well as on servers connected to storage and the network in between. That gives us a cohesive view into end-to-end application performance. And we think that’s the sort of visualization that enterprises will deem critical.

Article source: http://www.avaya.com/blogs/archives/2013/05/what-is-avayas-strategy-around-sdn-a-qa-with-avaya-networkings-chief-architect-paul-unbehagen.html

Products

Article source: http://www.avaya.com/blogs/archives/2013/04/do-collaboration-tools-really-boost-workplace-communication.html

We question ShoreTel’s methodology, its statistics, and its assertions. My Avaya colleagues Tim Johnson and Joe Scotto have created the following point-by-point rebuttal of ShoreTel’s claims, which I share below.

From The ShoreTel
Rebuttal Blog (4/24/13)

The Facts

    “No customer data was incorporated in
their analysis of costs.  ShoreTel commissioned the Aberdeen Group to
survey more than 300 customers and collect their actual historical operating
cost data over multiple years.  This is the only way to know what the
actual operating costs will be, and is far more precise than a lab experiment.”

-     Avaya chose to have Tolly perform an
apples-to-apples product comparison between ShoreTel and Avaya in a
controlled, lab environment, thus eliminating variances like software
releases, customer sophistication, usage patterns, and personal opinions.

-    ShoreTel’s Aberdeen report surveyed a mixed sample
of customer types with a mixed set of products. Such variances can skew
results.

-    In addition, the Tolly test uses IP Office Server
Edition. This is a new solution which includes centralized licensing and management.
Clearly, that impacts TCO operations. 

-    None of the customers in the ShoreTel sponsored
Aberdeen report were using Server Edition, which invalidates their rebuttal.

     ”The report does not include the
expected software upgrade costs a customer would face over five years. ShoreTel
does not charge for upgrades. Avaya charges for all feature releases,
resulting in higher costs.”

-    This statement is completely inaccurate.

-    Avaya includes all software upgrades as part of the Avaya
IP Office Support Services offer.

     ”There are no labor costs for
operating the system included in the analysis, as their lab experiment
implies they are the same.  Customer interviews validate more resources
are needed to manage Avaya IP Office systems, resulting in higher costs.”

- Tolly did in fact evaluate administration as part of
their comparison. Here is a direct quote from the report:

-   “Tolly
engineers performed typical system administrative tasks and noted the
ease-of- deployment and functionality of the systems. Typical functions consisted
of: importing users, adding trunk lines, configuring backups, and global
system variables for use in the environment. Engineers also evaluated the
ease-of- upgrades and different administration options available.”

-    In addition, ShoreTel does not offer data to validate
the claim that “more resources” are required for the Avaya solution.
Remember, customer interviews based on prior products are not a valid
comparison. Also, as stated, the Avaya IP Office Server Edition product is
new (July 2012). 

    “No actual customer data reflecting
demand on IT to support users is included. 
The analysis of Avaya versus ShoreTel customers validates Avaya IT
departments get more requests from users, which results in higher support
costs.”

-    Avaya was first to market with a browser-based user
application (i.e. one-X portal from IP Office Release 5 in 2009).  With that release we noted the significant
time savings for user deployment and support.

-    The continuous innovations from release 5 to the
current release of 8.1 all contribute to the conclusions stated in the Tolly
report. And IT departments will enjoy the savings and efficiencies derived
from them. Again, the lab test demonstrates that Avaya delivers an average of
32% savings over the ShoreTel solution (i.e. based on a 5 year TCO
calculation).

-   One must note that there is no valid source for the
claim that “Avaya IT departments get more requests…”. Is this an assumption
based on discussions with “select” ShoreTel customers? The Aberdeen report does
not indicate why specific customers were selected to participate in the
survey. All that is provided is the following statement:

- “Aberdeen
supplemented this online effort with telephone interviews with select
survey respondents”

    “Avaya’s own One-X Portal product
literature indicates their products do not always operate as expected.”

-    Every software product has the potential to
occasionally “not always operate as expected.”  There is no data to suggest that this is
more common with Avaya software than with software developed by ShoreTel.

-    It’s not clear what ShoreTel is trying to say here
about the Tolly report claims.

    “ShoreTel holds to the accuracy of our
TCO calculations and guarantees the results. 
If Avaya can produce statistically accurate customer data gathered
from a third party that can demonstrate their TCO to be lower, ShoreTel will
lower our price accordingly.”

-    Customers should read the fine print in ShoreTel’s
“guarantee”.

-    ShoreTel literature states that customers must use
the ShoreTel tool (i.e. which includes their view of all competitive pricing)
to qualify for the guarantee. In
addition, customers must have a minimum of 100 IP endpoints to qualify,
excluding approximately 99% of businesses from participating.

-    As of 4/24, below is an excerpt from the ShoreTel
TC document, verbatim:

-    “System
configurations covered are limited to:

-    Minimum
of 100 IP phone users

-    Minimum
of 10 IP phone users per locations”

-    “The ShoreTel
TCO Tool must be used to calculate the difference between ShoreTel and
competitive systems.”

-    The Avaya
IP Office TCO tool is open to all customers. It does not presume to tell
you what you would pay for a competitor’s product. It’s confident to stand on
its own TCO strength that you can calculate with your own data.  

-    We invite prospects to use that tool for help and
encourage them to ask ShoreTel for details about their “guarantee”.

-    “Based on the feedback from the Avaya
employees that have joined ShoreTel, from discussions with employees impacted
by Avaya’s headcount reductions, and from discussions with resellers that
sell both Avaya and ShoreTel, we find the interview results gathered by
Aberdeen Research to be consistent with what customers face in the production
environments.”

-    Tolly obtained the pricing from a reseller that
sourced both solutions. The analysis included list pricing as well as
“street” discounts so there is no subjectivity in the numbers used.

-     The misleading information in the Aberdeen report was
a key driver for Avaya to set the record straight with this report from
Tolly.

-    The facts are that the “results” gathered for ShoreTel
by Aberdeen do not reflect a like-for-like solution comparison. There were
numerous pricing and feature errors stated. No lab testing was conducted and
the survey sampling was significantly flawed (e.g. Avaya IP Office had half
the number of customers represented in the survey vs  ShoreTel; yet in SME markets, ShoreTel has less
than 2% global market share where Avaya has roughly seven times that share,
or 15%).

-    Avaya can support each of those points with
specifics and we welcome any opportunity to do so. Please contact one of our
authorized resellers for a full briefing.

Posted 29 Apr 2013 at 07:31 AM

Article source: http://www.avaya.com/blogs/archives/2013/04/Avaya-IP-Office-8.1-Beats-ShoreTel-On-TCO.html

Flying back to California, I was reflecting on what I really had learned from these experts.

We did discuss the rapid advancement of BYOD, the broad adoption of video and the many creative ways to use mobile apps to solve practical problems in the enterprise.

But what really struck me was that, underlying all of these cool solutions, there was a basic need: to trust each other. Without trust there is no collaboration, without collaboration there is no execution; and without execution there is no sustainable business.

But what does trust mean for a CIO?

When it comes to trust nothing beats a face to face dialogue. But in a globally connected world, with companies leveraging talent and labor rates in different countries while serving customers around the world, trust needs to be cultivated on a day to day basis. This requires video-enabled collaboration solutions to effectively span timezones and cultural differences. And it requires that these solutions run on the devices now used by everyone – PCs and mobile devices.

Real Life, In Real Time

One executive, Mark, shared that he allows his marketing team to work from home to avoid them a very wasteful commute time; this has increased their productivity and their morale since his marketing managers across the Bay feel trusted and empowered. Mark has deployed a video solution integrated with document sharing so that they can easily review marketing presentations and programs.

Another IT executive, Gene, is adopting mobile video so field technicians can actually show engineers what’s happening live, and making sure the installations are accurately performed. Aric said that one of video’s greatest benefits is simply enabling him to look someone in the eye when asking them for commitment. Whether discussing the forecast during their weekly sales commit calls or when reviewing a proposal with their customers, reading the body language significantly increases the reliability of communication.

As Forrester Research puts it, video “helps to put a face and mannerism to a name and voice, enabling remote and distributed teams to feel more connected and more committed to shared goals.”

That was echoed by Carson, who says video provides his team with a level of alignment you just can’t get over the phone. When his product management team reviews and passionately debates the specs for a new product proposal with their overseas RD teams he knows that at the end of the video meeting all the participants have “bought” into the plan and they will carry it out as their own.

The Advantage Of Mobile

Patrick not only streamlined the claim process in his insurance company using video, but also increased the level of trust with his customers since their claims examiners can show the damage to a car with a live video feed to his supervisor directly from his iPad.

Dan talked about a “collaboration first, mobility second” approach, focusing on building a trust framework and streamlining processes to facilitate collaboration across teams. Anne, who works in the “safety and security first” realm of nuclear power plants, is also focused less on mobility and more on enabling collaboration with a high level of security. Such examples will grow quickly, as tablets outsell desktop PCs this year, according to IDC, and notebooks next year.

In some settings, video is making possible things that simply couldn’t happen before because of limited time or resources. For example, hospice nurses bring the doctor or family members to a patient’s bedside via video conference; a school contracts teachers from another county to teach remotely; and children are able to take a virtual field trip to NASA when a physical field trip is impractical due to lack of time, funding or other resources.

As I mentioned earlier, the type of video matters. A couple of people mentioned that their expensive video conference or telepresence rooms are gathering dust. Simple-to-use desktop video is picking up steam, but a complete solution needs to have rich video running on the device of the employee’s choice: from Android to iPad, iPhone, Mac, etc.

Practicing What We Preach

I had the opportunity to describe Avaya’s own internal use of video that has skyrocketed since the introduction of Scopia® since last summer. Within the first six months, more than 100,000 meetings had been held with Scopia, with over 310,000 attendees participating in point-to-point and multipoint video calls. This will only increase when we complete the worldwide roll-out of Scopia across our 15,000 employees.

We first started using Scopia during the due diligence process of acquiring Radvision. Because Radvision has such a globally dispersed organization with development locations in Israel, China, Italy and the US, it quickly became apparent how valuable Scopia was. It not only allowed very productive meetings without the need to travel, it also spanned timezones and cultural differences. As a result of this we decided to deploy Scopia across the company. Since then Scopia has literally changed how we collaborate in Avaya.

Why? Because the soft-client runs on all the most popular devices our employees use, it can be launched very quickly after a very easy download, it securely connects through the company firewall, and it provides a low-bandwidth high-quality of experience even over lossy Internet connections. The results? We now communicate with our customers and channel partners every day and conduct staff meetings and work groups over video, bringing team members from multiple locations together that had only known each other voices for many years.

The ironic thing about most collaboration technology today is that they sacrifice intimacy for speed. The miracle of video is that it gives us back the gift of sight. That’s why CIOs see video as a key way to strengthen trust, deepen collaboration and therefore accelerate execution in their business. That’s Business at Light Speed.

Posted 29 Mar 2013 at 12:08 PM

Article source: http://www.avaya.com/blogs/archives/2013/03/how-can-i-trust-you-cios-are-turning-to-this-answer.html

Why hasn’t a company like this upgraded its phone systems?

There could be several reasons. Its core business is clothing, not IT. With few extensions per locations, and so many locations throughout California, it could be very expensive for them to do a forklift upgrade. Furthermore, a new phone system could incur additional costs due to managing adds/moves/changes and, potentially, to the need to rewire the entire IP phone system.

In the U.S., small businesses like this retail outlet dominate the economy, with over 99.8% of companies having fewer than 1,000 employees, according to U.S. Economic Census statistics. They tend to be very dynamic, fast-growing and entrepreneurial.  However, like this store, they focus their financial resources on their core business and seldom have IT groups that can support all of their locations.

Therefore, the cost of upgrading and operating their communications infrastructure are key concerns for business owners.

With that in mind, a few months ago we commissioned a research firm, The Tolly Group, to calculate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of our latest product targeted to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), Avaya IP Office 8.1, and compare it to ShoreTel’s comparable Unified Communications Platform.

You can download the entire report here.

Why do we focus on ShoreTel? Because ShoreTel has an effective marketing campaign around the moniker of “Brilliantly Simple,” and also offers a lowest TCO guarantee to its customers. Hence, it provides the right benchmark.

 View full-sized chart by clicking here

So what did Tolly conclude? That Avaya IP Office 8.1 on average provides 32% TCO savings versus ShoreTel. Furthermore, Avaya IP Office 8.1′s Capex and Opex are lower than ShoreTel, across any configuration tested for 100, 400 and 700 users. Over 5 years, that adds up to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars saved.

View full-sized table by clicking here

Tolly isn’t the only analyst firm to find Avaya a better financial deal than its competitors. Nemertes Research finds Avaya to offer a first-year TCO less than half of Microsoft Lync, while Constellation Research found Avaya’s video solutions to offer a lower TCO than both Microsoft and Cisco.)

Small companies are very dynamic and many plan to rapidly grow. However, most lack a large IT department – if they have any full-time administrators on staff at all. Hence, the ability to easily scale their solution as they expand is key. Tolly reports that, “In addition to a 10 minute deployment, the [IP Office 500] appliance hosts an integrated storage module, capable of capturing 380 hours of voicemail or call recordings, and can scale to nearly 400 users without any additional hardware.”

Flexibility and Efficiency

Just like the retail store in Santa Barbara, many companies have successfully deployed Nortel solutions in the past. Investment protection becomes critical to limit expenses. In this regard, Tolly notes that: “Furthermore, IP Office provides greater deployment flexibility, as nearly all Avaya/Nortel phones manufactured in the last decade are compatible.”

Flexibility is also key when you have young workers, as the retail outlet I visited did, who sport smartphones and tablets they would like to use at work. Well, IP Office enables BYOD. For instance, employees can run an app on their smartphone that turns it into an extension of that Nortel phone behind the counter. That untethers employees, by letting them roam the store floor and still answer incoming calls. Voila! You’ve killed two birds with one stone.

Young workers and customers are also very conscious about the environment. A Green strategy can be crucial to a company’s go to market. Tolly found that “the Avaya phones exhibited up to 41% lower power consumption than the comparable ShoreTel phones”. For a retailer with 700 extensions in total, that works out to 1kW saved using Avaya IP Office.

And finally, customers need to account for the administration cost. And Tolly again concludes that “in contrast, the ShoreTel solution was more complex to upgrade, as both the ShoreGear appliance and the application server may need to updated. Updates from different versions might also require a conversion from one type of database to another.”

The Bottom Lne?

With Avaya IP Office, small yet vibrant enterprises can now afford to upgrade their telephony system and enjoy the benefits of modern Unified Communication and Collaboration. New SMEs can also now effectively equip their business with a state of the art collaboration solution that is light in cost and rich in functionality, such as allowing a business owner to increase the productivity of his or her sales force with a mobile BYOD solution.

Helping these customers save 32% versus ShoreTel will enable them to invest more in their core business and grow faster and more profitably.

I find this really brilliant. And really simple.

Posted 22 Apr 2013 at 12:31 PM

Article source: http://www.avaya.com/blogs/archives/2013/04/Avaya-Is-One-Third-Cheaper-Than-ShoreTel.html

By Gilman Stevens, Director of SBC RD and the VIPER Lab, Avaya and Gina Odean, National Director of Converged Solutions, NACR

(Note: This is an excerpt from Avaya’s recently-published e-book, The 2013 Guide To Collaboration Trends. Download the full 160-page PDF here.)

Your desk phone at work may seem no more dangerous than your coffee mug or stapler. But appearances can be deceiving. Unlike yesterday’s “dumbphone,” today’s VoIP-enabled phones combine the features of a computer and a network router in one.

The power and accessibility of these phones can be turned against them. Researchers at Avaya’s VIPER Lab and NACR have found that an unprotected IP phone gateway will be found and broken into by hackers located anywhere in the world within a week. Our research shows you can expect hackers to use your corporate network to rack up about $2,000 worth of fraudulent calls in just 8 hours–or half the time between the end of one workday and the start of the next one.

That’s not just theory; it’s reality. Enterprise customers hit by “toll fraud” tell VIPER Lab experts that they lost on average between $10,000 and $20,000 per month. One company lost $200,000 in a single month due to unauthorized international calls, usually to premium 1-900 numbers such as phone sex lines that charge hefty per-minute fees and from which the hackers directly or indirectly earn a cut.

Today’s unified communications (UC) networks mean that VoIP and SIP traffic runs over the same networks as your corporate data. That means that if you don’t take steps to secure your VoIP/SIP networks, you can make the latter vulnerable to malware and the hackers who create them. For example, using a VoIP phone in a company lobby or public area, a hacker with the right skills and knowledge of open- source tools can gain entrance into the corporate data network. Exploiting all-too-common weak passwords, the hacker can gain access to confidential company information and customer information in a matter of several hours.

Even More Threats

Again, all of this can be avoided if enterprises take common-sense steps to secure their VoIP/SIP networks (detailed below). But fail to do so and you expose other potential gaps. Just as hackers have extorted online retailers by threatening to disrupt their Web servers using mass denial of service (DoS) attacks, hackers can extort businesses by threatening to launch worker-crippling DoS attacks against UC networks. Or they can easily steal corporate information, either by eavesdropping on unencrypted VoIP conversations or by breaking into corporate servers as demonstrated by VIPER Lab researchers above.

The number of potentially unprotected pathways into your network is also growing, for two reasons:

1) the rise of telecommuting and home-based workers (and their often-insecure home Wi-Fi networks), and

2) the explosion in employees using tablets and smartphones at work, especially personally owned mobile devices.

To satisfy workers, companies are extending their VoIP and UC networks out to these endpoints. But in their rush, even healthcare and financial services organizations that operate under heavy security and privacy rules such as PCI DSS or HIPAA are often failing to create or enforce strong security policies protecting these remote outposts.

For example, a company may deploy a VoIP phone to a home office worker without forcing him or her to change the default “1234″ access password. In that state, a hacker can easily take control of your phone, either to break into your main corporate network or use it for social engineering purposes. For example, the hacker could change your caller ID to “IT Support” and use it to start calling employees and asking for their login and password details.

Gaining Peace of Mind

There are steps you can take with your VoIP software to cut down on risks. For instance, make it standard policy to encrypt all VoIP calls, whether they are between employees in the office (and thus behind your enterprise firewall) or if they are from workers’ mobile and home office phones outside your network DMZ. Avaya Aura® Communication Manager lets you turn encryption on or off for such calls. The peace of mind you’ll enjoy will outweigh any potential hit on performance.

Companies are also starting to ensure that their annual independent security audits include testing of how vulnerable their VoIP and SIP networks are. We are seeing financial firms, airlines, and other global service companies starting to include this in their network assessments. Very soon, this will become mainstream.

The real panacea for your UC security woes is something called a session border controller (SBC). Like a traffic cop for your IP voice and video traffic, a properly configured SBC can enhance the performance of your VoIP/SIP network while protecting you from disaster.

Avaya offers just such an SBC. Moreover, that SBC is bolstered by proactive research from the VIPER Lab that enables threats to be anticipated and locked down years before they are discovered. And it comes in versions suitable for both Fortune 500 firms and smaller companies.

Ah! you say, but my carrier or SIP trunking service provider says it uses an SBC. Isn’t that enough to protect me? Actually, no. The main job of a service provider’s SBC is to protect its network from potentially malevolent traffic coming via YOUR leased lines. Protecting your enterprise from things like potential toll fraud is a secondary concern. That means that if a hacker successfully sniffs out your company’s VoIP network, he or she could likely successfully make thousands of short calls that rack up as much as $1,000 in toll bills in a few seconds. While a service provider’s SBC is unlikely to block such calls, an enterprise- controlled SBC can easily be set to do so.

Also, enabling your service provider’s SBC to protect your enterprise SIP/ VoIP network requires you to open up and share your full internal topology with your service provider. Not only is that counter-intuitive, but it would require an extraordinary amount of trust in your service provider. It would be like a homeowner giving ADT a map to all of the valuables in their home, including the code to their safe, in the hope that it would make their home safer from thieves.

The final analysis: Any enterprise that wants to protect its UC network needs to take all of the steps above, including deploying its own SBC. It is as much of a must-have as a network firewall for any company connected to the Internet.

*************

Gil Stevens is Director of Avaya’s Session Border Controller product RD team and the VIPER (VoIP Exploit Research) Lab. He has nearly three decades of telecom network experience with a passion for software quality and network security.

Gina Odean is National Director of Convergence at NACR, leads a team of highly certified Convergence Engineers who serve its customer base locally and globally. NACR is one of the largest Avaya channel partners worldwide and nine-time Avaya Business Partner of the Year. It is also the 2012 Avaya U.S. Services Partner of the year and a leading global integrator of business communications solutions and services.

Posted 17 Apr 2013 at 11:58 AM

Article source: http://www.avaya.com/blogs/archives/2013/04/unified-communications-creates-security-holes-heres-how-to-plug-them.html

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Today were talking to telecom attorney Martha buyer who’s been on the program several times now to provide a little bit of legal insight on what’s going on in the state of Wisconsin welcome to the program are that good to have you back.

Before a bill in any state can become a law that’s actually on the books it has to go through certain due processes and those processes may vary from state to state Martha give us a rundown real quick of how something becomes an actual law

In what he gives in the legislature this is where things to be added these can be taken out things to be modified

Interested in Wisconsin I don’t worry about running out in making my PBX 911 complaint tomorrow but there is something happening something is going implicitly to keep my eye right?

The document does provide little developed about what the bill is about basically they call off 25,000 feet is a breakpoint so they’re worried about larger buildings but they also call up some additional exceptions that are a little bit different than what we normally say right?

So my opinion what this does is that it recognizes that NLT has business campus environments may have unique characteristics to the mid-guards the front gate you might have internal security you might have a multi-building campus you might appeal to get into some buildings in a recognizes that a plan has to be put in place in conjunction with the PBX owner operator that establishes here’s what’s can happen in a given of an emergency 7000 911 this is what’s going to be kicked off these the procedures is the internal local alerts that are to be provided here’s where you enable responsive to get more information and then a joint plan can be worked out together in conjunction with police fire and medical door the people that have to come and get you in a time of need to its critical that these people are included in this decision process.

Again something that’s not going to happen right away but certainly something that we have to keep our eyes on and I’m sure you’re ready on the phone and I’m going to be on the phone they can some calls to find out what made this bubble to the service all of a sudden what’s going on in Wisconsin

Martha thanks again so much for jumping on this right away I know I called you late last night and said I need a legal analysis on this right away for a podcast and thanks for writing the time a Saturday morning to talk to us I’m sure there’s more to come will be talking about this real soon

Martha can be found on the web at www.Marthabuyer.com or you can send her an e-mail Martha@MarthaBuyer.com.

The APN podcast is expanding it’s broadcasts and will be at the Avaya Evolutions in New York City on Tuesday, April 9, where we will have some great interviews with keynote speakers and attendees and some very special guests. We will also be at the IAUG CONVERGE 2013 show in Orlando Florida in June where you can find us at booth number 337; where will be broadcasting live from the event. Ee sure to stop by and say “Hi!”.

Want more on E9-1-1?  E9-1-1 Talk Podcast
Subscribe to my weekly E9-1-1 Talk Podcast here

Thanks for stopping by and reading the Avaya CONNECTED Blog on E9-1-1, I value your opinions, so please feel free to comment below or if you prefer, you can email me privately.

Public comments, suggestions, corrections and loose change is all graciously accepted
Until next week. . . dial carefully.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter @Fletch911

Article source: http://www.avaya.com/blogs/archives/2013/04/mlts-pbx-law-in-the-hopper-in-wisconsin.html

The National 9-1-1 Education Coalition has selected “Be 9-1-1 Ready” as the 2013 campaign theme for the National 9-1-1 Education month starting on Monday, April 1.

The primary messages for this year are:

KNOW WHERE YOU ARE
Where are you right now? Could you tell 9-1-1 exactly where to find you? One of the first things that you will be asked by a 911 call taker is to provide the location of the emergency that your reporting. The call taker may not automatically know your location, or they may be asking you to confirm it. Always be aware of your surroundings, and tell the call taker the location of the emergency, or if you don’t know describe it by providing landmarks such as cross streets mileposts or unique geographic surroundings. Your corporate telephone system, or PBX, may not be reporting your proper location.

DON’T TEXT TO 9-1-1
Although that technology is rapidly coming, your local 9-1-1 may not be able to accept text messages, photos and video. A voice call continues to be the best way to reach 9-1-1, as the current 9-1-1 system was designed for voice communications.

USE A LANDLINE
Whenever possible, use a landline to call 9-1-1. Cell phones aren’t always routed to the closest 9-1-1 center and valuable time could be lost while your call is transferred.

STAY CALM AND READY TO LISTEN
9-1-1 is there to help you through your emergency until help arrives. Be ready to listen closely and follow directions explicitly. In an emergency, seconds matter, so being knowledgeable and prepared can make all the difference.

HELP 9-1-1 HELP YOU
The more you know on what to expect when you call 9-1-1, the faster 9-1-1 can get you the help you need.
If you dial 9-1-1 for a nonemergency matter, you are tying up resources that could be needed in a real emergency.
Even with no training, you can save a life! Carefully follow each instruction the 9-1-1 call taker gives you, and never hang up until the call taker does.

This is just a sample of the great information that you’ll find at www.know911.orgwhere you can download information about the campaign, messages, Know911 resources, as well as links to the various state agencies, and industry groups.

Millions of lives are saved each and every year because people know what to do when they call 9-1-1 for help.

Do you?

Want more on E9-1-1?  E9-1-1 Talk Podcast
Subscribe to my weekly E9-1-1 Talk Podcast here

Thanks for stopping by and reading the Avaya CONNECTED Blog on E9-1-1, I value your opinions, so please feel free to comment below or if you prefer, you can email me privately.

Public comments, suggestions, corrections and loose change is all graciously accepted
Until next week. . . dial carefully.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter @Fletch911

Article source: http://www.avaya.com/blogs/archives/2013/03/are-you-ready-to-be-911-ready.html

By Marc Randall, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Avaya and Parag Patel, Vice President of Global Alliances, VMware

A
private cloud is a great choice to host collaboration solutions–if you
plan upfront. Here’s how not to get bit by security, integration,
performance, or other common challenges.

Collaboration in the
cloud is a genius idea. Massively scalable and low-cost infrastructure
is just what businesses need to bring seamless communication back to a
mobile, global workforce. But the way that cloud has taken hold in most
enterprises, via software-as-a-service (SaaS), may be too fast and loose
for some of today’s enterprise data, which is highly regulated and thus
must be highly secured.

Private clouds are growing in popularity
as a result. A private cloud provides scalability while slashing IT
costs and complexity, all without compromising security. For many
organizations, it offers the best blend of public and private network.

As
organizations plan their private cloud deployment, they should be aware
of the typical issues that they may face. According to a June 2012
Forrester survey of U.S. IT decision-makers that had deployed private
clouds at their enterprise, 62 percent encountered problems with
security and compliance, while 52 percent faced trouble integrating the
cloud with existing tools and apps. Meeting service-level agreements
with customers and end users was a problem for nearly four out of 10
users, while nearly a third of IT buyers faced problems with software
licensing or creating self-service access for users. The likelihood of
these issues arising increases if your organization is running
high-bandwidth applications such as video collaboration.

As with
most IT-related challenges, the key to making your deployment as smooth
as possible is to arm yourself in advance. Once you know the likely
causes of troubles, you can forge a strategy to mitigate or avoid them.

What follows are best practices to combat each of these potential complications.

Issue: Increased security and compliance risk.

Strategy: Holistic evaluation of your security policies.

Over
time, security policies tend to stack up. It’s a lot easier to add new
policies on top of old than it is to go back and eliminate ones that are
no longer needed. To combat this, many organizations have made it a
best practice to re-evaluate all policies every year. The purpose is to
identify and cull older policies that could be an impediment to agility
and growth.

When adding a private cloud, a security review is more
important than ever. Get rid of policies that do not add value to the
business and conflict with cloud use. If new policies need to be added,
make sure they are fully automated and non-intrusive so as not to impede
employee collaboration and workflows– regardless of cloud use.

Issue: Integration challenges.

Strategy: Prepare and train IT staff for intervention.

Few
technologies stand alone in today’s data center. Collaboration tools,
in particular, can involve a matrix of protocols and codecs that can
make interoperability challenging.

Moreover, most organizations
will be using a mix of outsourced software services in combination with
internally hosted services, and these will need to connect and interact
with one another. As cloud technology matures, standards will emerge to
make this task easier. But for the time being, you may need to manually
intervene. The sooner you prepare and train your IT staff for this
hurdle, the more efficient you will be in responding to demands.

Issue: Unpredictable performance.

Strategy: Protect mission-critical workloads.

The
point of cloud is to push up utilization rates to achieve greater
efficiency. But adding heavy, unpredictable network traffic such as
video can put SLAs (service-level agreements) and mission-critical
workloads in danger.

Protect mission-critical workloads from
performance degradation by isolating new rollouts. This way you can test
the performance of applications that are new to your cloud without
jeopardizing mission-critical workloads. You can add more applications
to this environment over time, once you have a performance baseline.

Issue: Licensing that isn’t designed for the cloud.

Strategy: Delay deployment or isolate to one physical server.

Not
every application is built for the cloud; applications that require
dedicated hardware are usually licensed by the number of physical
servers used. Many software vendors have been slow to modify their
licensing to make it affordable to run in the cloud, where multiple
physical servers share the workload of many virtual machines. Moving
these applications to the cloud can turn out to be costly.

To
avoid a costly licensing hike, identify cloud-unfriendly licenses early
on in your planning. Talk to vendors to see if they will renegotiate
your license terms. If not, you’ll have two options. First, it may make
sense to defer cloud deployment for these applications, concentrating
instead on software that works well atop an abstracted middleware layer
or that observes dynamic resource consumption patterns. Alternatively,
you can attempt to isolate the workload, dedicating the specific VMs
(virtual machines) on one physical server to the application.

Clearing the Haze

Greater
collaboration is a huge gift to your workers. Greater security and
control over your applications are key for IT. A private cloud aligns
these objectives together, making it possible for you to scale back SaaS
use and still deliver the services your employees need to innovate and
succeed.

While provisioning a private cloud is not always simple,
the challenges are predictable. With the proper attention and planning
you can flag your trouble areas early, and get down to the business of
delivering efficient, affordable collaboration and other software
services to your eager workforce.

Marc Randall is
Senior Vice President and General Manager, Avaya Networking. He has
held senior executive positions at several networking vendors, including
Cisco Systems, Force10 networks and Brocade Communications.

Parag Patel
is Vice President for Global Strategic Alliances for VMware, managing
VMware’s partner ecosystem. Avaya and VMware collaborate on a number of
products, including Avaya Aura® on VMware, and Avaya Collaboration Pods, a portfolio of cloud-ready, turnkey virtualized server platforms. Visit Avaya.com to learn more.

Posted 27 Mar 2013 at 07:51 AM

Article source: http://www.avaya.com/blogs/archives/2013/03/how-to-optimize-your-private-cloud-for-the-collaboration-era.html