VoIP : What can it do ?

A.R. chitra

Today most organizations are expanding at a rapid pace and becoming global players but the cost involved for infrastructure and its management has gone up significantly. It is becoming important for the organization to reduce the expenditure and the reduction on International voice is becoming prime focus as it forms a considerable portion of the overall expenditure.

VoIP is displacing traditional telephony services a lot faster than anyone expected. Within few years the majority of enterprise would have switched some portion of their network to VoIP.

The key driving force behind the VoIP implementation for any organization is cost savings. It reduces the Capital Investment cost, Operational expenses and the maintenance cost. The other factor that the IT managers appreciate is the manageability of a VoIP solution. This is much easier compared to that of the traditional solution.Some people think VoIP means their voice signals travel over the public Internet. Not so! Sify transports voice over its own network, prioritizing the voice traffic thus assuring the quality. The quality of voice is determined by parameters like Latency, Packet loss and Jitter.

While the data application is more tolerant for Latency and Jitter and the packet loss is over come by retransmission, the conversational voice quality will degrade below the human brain tolerance when subject to increase in packet loss, latency and jitter. The QoS tools are enforced in the network to minimize the degradation in voice quality by prioritizing it over the delay tolerant data. The need and method of deploying the VoIP may vary from company to company but the technological advancement allows the service provider to meet the demands of small to large enterprises by providing an independent or a converged solution that can be easily deployed and managed while achieving greater cost savings for the organization.

Data Security

Urmez Daver,Safescrypt

Organizations today face an increasingly complex work environment where information and data are considered key assets to the organization. It is therefore imperative for organizations to look beyond the needs of network and perimeter security and proactively adapt to the overall changing landscape of security requirements.

Key factors responsible for propelling this change include :

| Mobility of an organizations workforce | The need for Regulatory Compliance | Extended networks for business process enhancements | Incidence of data theft within the organization | The Hacker: Internal and External.
With business processes moving outside the corporate firewall to encompass remote mobile communications, data security takes on a new level of importance. An organizations needs to acknowledge the significance of identifying its workforce in a secure and reliable manner working at the edge of their network and demanding information resources stored centrally.

Further, this mobile workforce could store vital information on portable computing devices like laptops, mobile phones, PDAs therefore the risk of loss, theft or unauthorized access assumes significantly high proportions. Every transaction - including access to data, storing, and transporting has to be dealt with in a secure manner. Data Security is no longer an optional plugin into an IT infrastructure, but is an integral part of an Enterprise Security Roadmap or Framework. In a recent survey conducted on Top Priorities of a CIO - Data Security and Integrity issues were at the forefront.

Data Security fundamentally deals with ensuring the following :

|Privacy of Information: How do you ensure that information is viewed only by indented/authorize personnel within an organization ? |Authentication of User : How do you ensure that only a legitimate user is able to access information being requested ? | Integrity of Data & Information : How do you ensure that data is stored or transmitted in manner that it could never be altered without the requisite authorization ? | Non-Repudiation of transactions : How do you ensure that a transaction is enforceable in a court of law and cannot be repudiated ? PAIN, an acronym for what Data Security addresses and it is these basic issues that fundamentally govern the domain of Data Security.

Next Issue : Solutions Available to address Data Security concerns. 

For more information on VoIP or Data Security Solutions from Sify , please email esbmarketing@sifycorp.com

This uses domain-based email authentication, using public-keys advertised in the DNS. "DomainKeys" creates a domain-level authentication framework for email by using public-key technology and the DNS to prove the origin and contents of an email.

Companies that are susceptible to phishing attacks can buy email service from a company like Sify who has implemented DomainKeys. Sify is using DomainKeys submitted to IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) by Yahoo.

All of their outgoing emails of Sify customers will be signed with DomainKeys. Sify can add a filters to its customers' email systems that drop any unsigned or improperly signed messages claiming to come from its domain thus protecting tens of millions of customers from these phishing attacks.

Can you bank on a single technology?

No single technology can combat spam totally. ISPs, email service providers will have to deploy multiple technologies to raise the cost of spam.

Also all such providers have to be quick to adopt new technology or change strategy with time.It would be unfair to rate the above techniques; each has its own merits. However, together they provide a safety net. Some people may feel that maintaining large number of such applications may be a daunting task. Some may not have the expertise or knowledge to make the best of use of these technologies and hence, would be unwilling to take the time to learn. Still some may be willing to understand the problem and develop a strategy to deal with it.

With self effort and planning, one can effect a dramatic reduction in the spam flow, but it is necessary to continually modify and fine-tune the applications. Sify can offer support to the administrators in the following four ways:

• Implement/Manage a new highly scalable Secure Spam Resistant Mail Server - SifyMail.
• Manage your existing Mail Server and make it SPAM free (protects your current investments).
• Provide a SPAM free hosted solution where you don't invest on any hardware. Here Sify will host the server and deliver SPAM free emails to your own server. You have the added advantage of reducing your bandwidth by as much as 40% (depending on the amount of spam you receive)
• Provide consultancy on setting up your own Linux Mail Server.

Manvendra Bhanguli is Vice President, Software and systems, Sify. He can be contacted esbmarketing@sifycorp.com