October 31st, 2018 | 11am EDT

Watch On-Demand as we explore our new and robust network security portfolio designed to keep your communication network running smoothly. Ribbon delivers security solutions that provide intelligent service quality through proactive analytics and that are built specifically to improve user experience and reduce your operational costs.

We have the proven products and solutions to secure your network from any goblins or ghouls that come your way.

During this replay, we'll cover these topics and more:

  • The risks involved with unsecured networks
  • Protecting from the core to the edge with PSX and Ribbon Protect
  • Edge Security and SD-WAN solutions
  • Missed revenue opportunities
  • Why Ribbon and Q&A
John Macario | Ribbon Communications
John Macario
SVP Marketing and Product Management
Ribbon Communications
Jim O'Loughlin | Ribbon Communications
Jim O'Loughlin
Regional Sales Director
Ribbon Communications
Jamie Gibson | Ribbon Communications
Jamie Gibson
VP Sales Engineering
Ribbon Communications

WEBINAR: Securing your Network from the Core to the Edge

October 31st, 2018 | 11am EDT

 

Secure Your UC Deployments

So in today's webinar, because it's Halloween, we're going to talk about scary things, fear, and uncertainty. What are the perils of delivering unified communications? I think you're going to find that a lot of what we talk about will be familiar to you if you've been out in the field doing this. We'll talk a bit about deployment models. What works, what doesn't, and why? And then introduce Network Edge Orchestration the Ribbon solution for service assurance and security for unified communications. Jim's going to talk to us a little bit about our SD WAN product and how that might fit into your UCaaS deployments. Then finally, we'll talk about cloud-to-edge-complete which is an as a service model for network edge orchestration.

"What's so hard about delivering unified communications?" There are many factors that can disrupt a successful UC deployment. We can have issues with the transport network internet links going down, unfriendly routing devices, or simply a wide variety of sip endpoints. They can all contribute to the problems we have. Eavesdropping attacks and fraud in the network can happen at any time and this all leads to customer experience issues. So service providers have some very real challenges when it comes to Hosted UC, often UC deployments sit behind routers and firewalls with different rules or configurations. This makes troubleshooting slow and sometimes root causes can't be found in problems. Limited interoperability between the various sip endpoints can also slow deployments and cause ongoing issues and sometimes they don't manifest until weeks or months after the initial turn up. Often times Service Providers have no visibility to the devices behind their customers' firewall. When the customer has an issue it's difficult to troubleshoot and nearly impossible to tell if the problem is on the LAN side or the WAN side of the network. This lack of visibility contributes to additional truck rolls, we all know that having to send a tech out multiple times for an installation and troubleshooting can get very expensive and cause extended customer downtime. And all of these issues create high support costs which lower profit margins and contribute to lower customer satisfaction. Finally, network security vulnerabilities can increase fraud, cause outages, and increase operational costs. So in January 2018, GatePoint research published an interesting survey. They asked service providers about their biggest challenges and how they affect their business. A "lack of LAN visibility" and "remote troubleshooting" made up about 50% of the responses. While "too many truck rolls," you can see down there in the yellow, made up another 16%. So almost 65-66% of the technical challenges from operators resulted from challenges in the network. These challenges can be directly linked to the long resolution times and the high operating costs that you see on the pie chart there on the right making up almost 62% other responses there.

In this environment of hybrid cloud and on-premise applications, as well as bring your own device policies, where we all have our own Android and iPhone devices we need a zero trust policy for security. We can no longer assume an application or even a network is safe. A lot of enterprises have developed a layered security posture, however, we're seeing the UC components are particularly vulnerable because of several factors, including the size of the pipes. And that's because these pipes are not just carrying voice calls, but also video calls, and often the systems see a lot of data moving through the network or the pipes and they assume that that data is totally normal. This creates an opportunity for threats to use the communication system, not just to get in, but to get out with whatever they're stealing. We see threats all throughout the communication system from mobility devices, video, UC collaboration, even voice over Wi-Fi and then more. These bad actors, as we call them, are constantly looking for ways to cause havoc on the network. Either for monetary gains, to disrupt internal/external customer service, or just to do reconnaissance into the entire corporate network to figure out other ways to attack. The rapid growth of SIP-based communications has caught the attention of many of these bad actors. They're looking to design their attacks to bring down your communication's infrastructure through any means such as telephony denial service attack, voice phishing, registration floods, malicious endpoints, fraud, sip service password attacks, and many more.

Think of your unified communication system like your office. It has an external door and it has windows that have air vents. These bad actors go around examining all those vulnerabilities looking for any point of entry to the network. These unified communication systems are an attractive point of vulnerability for those looking to attack your enterprise customers or even your own network. Once they get in they can do a lot of damage using the UC system. CFCA estimated sip hacking cost more than 11 billion dollars in 2016. They also estimated toll fraud to be more than 29 billion dollars in 2017 and finally, Secure Logics reported that TDOS attacks were up 50% year-over-year with 5 occurring every minute. Besides having the ability to steal services, hackers are paid to ensure that services and access to services are compromised. When the UC network is down, it's something that impacts people end-to-end across the enterprise.