Adopting VOIP without unnecessary risk to your organisation

(20/03/2009)

For many years, voice over IP (VOIP) has held the promise of enabling the next generation of voice communications within the enterprise. Unfortunately, its adoption has been slowed; sometimes by the reality of poor performing WAN application, in other cases by perceptions that (VOIP) technology is not quite ready for the mainstream market. These problems, both real and imagined, have forced IT organisations and (VOIP) vendors to take a closer look at the technology and ensure that WAN solutions deliver the features, quality, and reliability that customers demand.

Blue Coat Systems regional sales director Mike Hemes looks into how application, delivery and network would work with companies that adopt VOIP and focuses on the importance of visibility and why poor WAN application performance for users poses an unnecessary risk to an organisation.

With a new generation of mature, reliable solutions, VOIP is once again building up momentum within the market. As vendors and customers implement strategies to move from a traditional TDM-based circuit-switched PBX to a converged IP voice and data network, an increasing number of enterprise organisations are trying to understand how their existing network can handle the convergence of voice and data traffic without compromising performance and reliability. However, there are many critical factors pertaining to VOIP’s viability, regardless of which system is deployed across the distributed enterprise.

Firstly, enterprises must determine how many VoIP users they will be supporting, as well as their average call length and call volume. An organisation’s VoIP system vendor can help make this determination. Secondly, companies may want to look towards application discovery and monitoring technologies to gain visibility into how bandwidth is being used by their data applications, so they can segregate essential from non-essential application traffic. Once organisations have detailed information on current bandwidth usage and projected voice traffic, they will be better prepared to conduct accurate capacity planning.

Furthermore, it is also possible that an organisation may need to increase the size of its WAN links to support VoIP traffic, but it is not advisable to increase bandwidth without first adopting a sound application delivery strategy. Why? Because IP allows users to consume all available bandwidth regardless of the link speed - much like traffic tends to rapidly fill new lanes on a motorway. Simply adding more bandwidth without proper management and control may only result in adding more traffic, rather than improving the quality of VoIP service.

As suggested, by planning a VoIP deployment or investing in more bandwidth, companies have adequate visibility and control to make sure they are generating maximum performance and value from their existing WAN links. The best place to start is by understanding exactly how a company’s WAN bandwidth is being used. Most network managers do not have full visibility into their WAN traffic, and without application-layer visibility they will be ineffective at preparing network for voice traffic, and that’s when the problems begin.

However these days, organisations also require all application level traffic running across their WAN links, whether it be critical business applications, email, Web surfing, recreational applications, malicious traffic, and more. Once they have this level of visibility into the network they may be surprised to learn that a significant portion of their WAN resources are used for recreational activity such as peer to peer, YouTube video streaming, and audio file downloads. They would then have the ability to immediately control or block this traffic, individually or as a class, as meets the particular network use policies of the specific organisation. This can only be seen as an essential step toward effective bandwidth management for VoIP.

Therefore, organisations need to look into adopting a solution to help align their voice and data applications, and network resources, with the priorities of their business, while generating measurable cost savings in the process. This value is delivered through a combination of intelligent appliances built with patented software technology that provides unmatched visibility, acceleration, and security capabilities.

Specifically for VoIP, companies will require a solution that addresses chronic congestion, and related latency, jitter, and packet loss, that afflict voice quality at the LAN/WAN boundary as well as effectively manage all critical VoIP protocols and ensures the highest quality end-to-end communication on an individual, per-call basis.

Related topics:  Network Security   Security management and policies   Security threats and vulnerabilities   Virus, Worm, Email security, spyware and malware 

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