By John Macario, SVP of Product Management and Marketing at Edgewater Networks

The beginning of a new year is a time when many business managers reflect on learnings from the previous year and begin working on their goals for the current year. Business continuity and data security are, of course, top priorities and securing the network is a vital part of this. 

For network professionals, there is no word more fearsome than “breach.” A security breakdown can mean lost data, stolen secrets, expensive lawsuits, and more. According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach is now US$4 million. This is why nearly every organization that knows what's good for it now invests in antivirus, data loss prevention (DLP), and of course, firewalls.

These days, however, we need to protect more than just data. Enterprise communications have grown into a multi-billion dollar market, particularly due to the widespread adoption of VoIP and unified communications (UC) services. This presents a new challenge that firms will have to face in order to gain a winning edge: voice security. IP phone services present a whole new attack area to potential hackers, a frontier that firewalls simply cannot protect by themselves. The essence of this challenge lies in the fact that we're talking about two entirely different types of information transmission that, in turn, require different security solutions.

By Phil Bowers, Senior Marketing Manager, Grandstream Networks

For many businesses, videoconferencing has traditionally been seen as being a pipe dream – something they would love to be able to utilize but cannot because of a variety of factors. But not anymore: the videoconferencing marketplace is currently going through a major transformation.

By Stefan Eriksson, Marketing and Communications Manager of Konftel

Remote meetings with poor quality audio are often exhausting. Misunderstandings become more likely because it’s difficult to hear nuances and other subtleties in conversation. So you want to aim for the best sound quality possible during teleconferences. The following is a quick explanation of different technical requirements for audio quality.

• A purely mobile solution gives you great flexibility and mobility, but sometimes at the expense of sound quality. Many mobile operators now offer HD Voice in their networks, which delivers HD audio if the phone supports the technology.
• Traditional analog telephony delivers an acceptable sound quality, but with limitations in frequency range. Sometimes known as telephone quality or narrowband.
• VoIP, i.e., digital telephony via the data network (voice over IP), allows for extended frequency range, but with some compression. IP makes it possible to achieve superior audio quality, also called HD audio or wideband.
• Remember that all local networks and accessories, e.g. Wi-Fi, DECT (wireless telephony) or Bluetooth^®, affect the transmission capacity and can have an adverse impact on the sound quality.
• All of Konftel’s phones and conference units offer HD audio in contexts where PBXs and networks support it.

In the complicated SIP trunking migration process, here are some tips that will help you achieve the results you want for your organization.