Ways to Improve & Secure Unified Communications

Ways to Improve & Secure Unified Communications

Back in the day, business communications was disintegrated. Your phone system a huge box terminating rows of copper pairs from the local telecom service provider sat hissing in the closet, powering clunky telephones on every desk. It didnt talk to anything, except sideways to a voicemail system (another, usually server-shaped, box). The notion of presence was rudimentary limited to knowing when office-mates were on the phone, and when they had the do not disturb button turned on. Audio conferencing was yet another system something you dialed into. Meanwhile, if you had a LAN-connected PC on your desk, that whole universe of digital was separate. There was no common notion of message or routing connecting email and other forms of digital messaging with telephony. It was awful and expensive. It tied people to desks, limiting their ability to serve customers or collaborate with colleagues. And because it provided no way to marry communications with work no context, no surround information -- it put infinite, random speed bumps in the path of productivity and work flow.

Ways to Improve & Secure Unified Communications

The internet along with converged fixed and mobile some of the core problems. communications have now solved Everything can now live on IP

old-school voicemail that doesnt know how to filter and forward calls to your mobile number

Businesses, however, typically need more control and security. And they need higher orders of integration between communications and the apps they use in most cases, Microsoft Office. So the business channel of Unified Communications is becoming a Microsoft channel, based on Office and other critical MS applications (e.g., MS Project) integrated with Exchange Server, Office Communications Server, SharePoint (for higherorder collaboration) and Lync, for desktop and mobile UC. The telephony part, still somewhat an outlier, can be entirely IP-based, as with Office365, Microsofts own cloud-based UC service; or supplied via integration with an IP or conventional (or hybrid) PBX. There are a number of platforms currently available that enable this higher order of UC integration and management. In the latter category, Avayas UC/ UM integration with Exchange features back-end integration and front-end options that include Avayas new Flare device an Android tablet that works as

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when you are on the road, and forward messages as audio attachments to email. the mobile voicemail that doesnt networks; every communications function can be performed in software. You have a smartphone in your pocket that lets you surf the web and dial any number you see; send text messages to colleagues and even see them on a map. On desktop or laptop, you probably use Skype or another voice/video/conference-capable instant-message platform to keep in touch with colleagues and customers. This in combination with enterprise calendaring (and, on another digital channel, social networks) gives you a very rich notion of presence, where you not only know when colleagues are available but what their mood is today and what music theyre listening to on iTunes. At the same time, though, its all still pretty disintegrated. And if you look around, its remarkable how much of the old communications infrastructure still hangs around: the stationsets on desktops, the dial-up audio conference bridges, the Its remarkable, in fact, how close you can get to real unified communications today, even just using free software and web applications. Skype is an obvious example, though still not integrated with other business apps. Google is also clearly a contender the Google homepage now fuses access to Gmail, Google Voice, Google Chat, Google Docs, and various forms of digital presence, including the new Google+ social network. Unified Communications is about taking the next step: bringing everything together so that all communications applications work together. Unified Communications finally promises to bridge the gap so that communications can happen anywhere, on any device, at any time, and with seamless connectivity regardless of the device or network being used.

Ways to Improve & Secure Unified Communications

a mobile videoconferencing and collaboration workstation. Ciscos solutions, which cover

Unified Communications given its critical and central nature to business and the huge volume of regulated and proprietary

and installing N certificates, you have a single certificate model that works for all legitimate connections, installs everywhere, and adapts to minor changes via wildcarding. Definitely a powerful tool, UC certificates should be purchased only from a reputable top-tier Certificate Authority, and installed carefully according to Microsofts and the CAs recipes. Otherwise you run some risk of building security holes into the system. But done properly, UC certificates are an elegant solution, enabling global support of a seamless unified communications experience one that accommodates all communications paradigms possible in the fast-growing global marketplace.

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the waterfront of basic desktop and mobile UI and integrated messaging, also extend up into the companys evolving telepresence technologies. Whichever way an organization chooses to invest, a core aspect of the architecture that network of Exchange and correlated application servers is common to most solutions. In one sense, that should be comforting to IT Exchange is a fairly flexible system, with great support and many options, robust, and relatively easy to scale. But theres a rub here that can be hard to grasp unless youve managed an Exchange implementation over some span of time, which is that Exchange changes constantly, with every corporate hiccup, new satellite office, acquisition, or layoff. That means the network map and domain locations of your Exchange and related servers change constantly. And that, in turn, means that your authentication and encryption are in a constant state of flux. There is, however, an elegant solution. Since 2007, Exchange has had the ability to use so-called UC multidomain SAN certificates individual certificates enabling authenticated, encrypted connection across multiple domains, subdomains and hostnames through use of the Subject Alternative Name standard. What this means, in effect, is that instead of buying information flowing through it is one of those applications you so when you consider that all your unified communications facilities need to communicate globally with the open internet otherwise, the work anywhere part doesnt, well, work. Clearly old-school digital certificates, tied to specific domains, are not the right tools for keeping up with the constant evolution of an Exchange implementation. They can be used, but theyll end up costing you plenty and driving your IT team crazy. must secure to the hilt. Especially