The workday continues to expand in both hours and location. Meetings with customers, partners and suppliers across the globe take me away from the four walls of Sonus on a regular basis. Thankfully, Microsoft Lync’s mobile client allows me to stay connected to the business regardless of where I may be in the world.  But, I am no different than most of you. We work with colleagues in different time zones at “off hours” from our homes, at our children’s sporting events, and yes, from coffee shops on the way to work in the morning.
 
The security model today is generally thought of as a question along the lines of “how do I secure the boundaries of the enterprise?” However, in a changing communications environment the new question must be “how do I provide secure access for employees, partners or customers outside of the enterprise in manner that is both convenient and compliant?” In other words, how can you deliver the same consistent and cohesive communications experience within or beyond the walled enterprise?
 
Forrester Research predicts that by 2017 tablets will be used by over one in eight people on earth, including 29 percent of online consumers globally. According to Forrester, 60 percent of online consumers in North America and 42 percent in Europe will own a tablet by 2017. Of the 381 million units sold by 2017, enterprise purchases will make up 18 percent — having risen every year as a percentage of sales since the inception of the market.  Just stop for a moment and imagine what that actually looks like.
 
Sharing confidential information via video or voice conferencing – coupled with data sharing innate to UC applications – allows each of us to be efficient as knowledge workers. The ability to bring together the right people to make rapid decisions is paramount to a company’s survival. However, this presents a challenge for the IT department—ensuring that access is granted only to authorized people and that the transmission of data over the shared medium of IP is secure.
 
A Session Border Controller (SBC) can address both needs with a single device.  An SBC at the edge of an enterprise ensures that the application is only accessed with correct credentials being exchanged between the clients and the SBC.  Attacks on the UC application, including flooding or denial of service (DoS), are discarded by the SBC without impacting performance or scale of the UC application. Once a client is authenticated by the SBC, the session should be encrypted. For example, encrypted sessions cannot be snooped by others using the same Wi-Fi infrastructure.
 
The goal of every IT organization is to enable the business, and in turn, SBCs enable IT to achieve that goal without compromising the intellectual property that IT safeguards on a daily basis. 
 
How safe are your “enterprise crown jewels” while your employees and partners are on the road? I would love to hear how you address the ever-growing need for secure, ubiquitous network access.