Microsoft Teams turns three years old this month. The development of Teams was a strong response to the competitive threat from Slack: an instant messaging platform that was trying to replace email. Microsoft Teams integrated chat, files and meetings and came as part of their enterprise licenses. Three years later, Teams has surpassed the number of daily active Slack users by 50% and is the fastest growing business application in Microsoft’s history.

Microsoft added calling capabilities to Teams at the end of 2017 with the intention of replacing Skype for Business. Microsoft Phone System was their cloud-based PBX, and they offered calling plans to enable connection to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) in specific markets. In 2018, they added a capability to Phone System, called Direct Routing, that enabled connections to third-party telephone systems.

Direct Routing is made possible through session border controllers (SBCs), which are devices that protect voice over IP (VoIP) sessions from external threats. SBCs can provide interworking between disparate voice connections and codecs. They can connect a call coming in on an analog line to a Teams user talking on a headset connected to his or her PC.

With VoIP, communications functionalities sharing the data network, it brings inherent bandwidth and security implications and increased susceptibility to bad actors. Ribbon SBCs can provide wide area network (WAN) link redundancy for business continuity and application traffic prioritization for service assurance. SBCs provide advanced protection against sophisticated toll fraud and denial of service attacks. They encrypt communications over the wire to protect against eavesdropping and effectively hide enterprise network topologies.

Ribbon takes network security a step further by consolidating and analyzing traffic from voice and data network elements. Using behavioral analytics, Ribbon can identify threats to one network element and use the information to defend other elements before they are attacked.

Check out this White Paper to learn more about how Ribbon Communications can secure your journey to Microsoft Teams.

Tranisition to Microsoft Teams