Voicespan

One sometimes overlooked advantage of using VoIP technology over traditional telephony solutions is the enablement of remote access to the phone system. So rather than having to physically be at your desk (or at least in the office if you use a DECT phone), you can now have your work phone number follow you around wherever you have internet access. Many corporations, and a number of smaller businesses, who have jumped on the VoIP bandwagon have enabled this aspect of the technology already, and find it extremely useful. There is one important consideration, though, that you should make if you are considering this course of action yourself.

In the VoIP world, your voice traffic follows a very similar route to your data traffic. In smaller companies especially, the temptation therefore is to utilise the existing data network infrastructure to ease the implementation of the voice network. However, since the voice traffic needs to be routed via the internet, you end up compromising your edge-of-network security to implement VoIP (for instance, the recommendation for RTP traffic is to open UDP ports 10000 to 20000 !). Bigger companies will probably separate voice and data network equipment as much as they can to mitigate this risk, but smaller companies may not wish to, for financial or other reasons. Introduce the desire to allow remote soft or hard phones to login to your company PBX so that calls to their DID can follow them around the world, and you can start to see the extent of the risk.

The solution ? Well, as in many cases, that depends on the company and how much effort they are willing to put into identifying and addressing the risks. The only real solution is to run a proper risk assessment exercise so that you understand what could happen, the likelihood of it happening, and what you have to do to fix it.

The result, though, is peace of mind to go with your mobile VoIP telephony.