VoIP Service Providers Not Focusing On Impending Threats: TechWeb

As the VoIP market evolves, security threats loom on the horizon; however, service providers are not seemingly taking the necessary actions to prepare for the impending threats, according to the latest report published by Light Reading’s VoIP Services Insider , a subscription research service from TechWeb’s Light Reading .

‘VoIP Security: Vendors Prepare for the Inevitable’ examines applications in the VoIP security market, including security trends and the evolution of products, as well as target markets for VoIP security and the managed services strategies of various vendors.

“Despite the hard lessons learned through security breaches in the earlier days of e-mail and Internet, most VoIP users are not securing their networks adequately,” says Denise Culver, research analyst with Light Reading’s VoIP Services Insider and author of the report. “Some vendors believe this is a matter of VoIP users simply not understanding how to adequately secure their networks, while others believe it is necessary to better educate the VoIP marketplace about security issues, as well as create better tools to combat threats themselves.”

Service providers must look at what has happened previously with VoIP security threats in order to prepare for what is to come, Culver says, because history will repeat itself. “Because many of the threats that VoIP providers can expect already have originated in the data world, there is some level of planning and expectation that VoIP security providers can take,” she notes. “One trend to expect in the coming months will be for VoIP vendors to partner with security providers, since they have already dealt with many of the problems expected on the VoIP front.”

Other key findings of ‘VoIP Security: Vendors Prepare for the Inevitable’ include the following:

- More outsourcing of VoIP security services is expected in the coming months, as threats increase and VoIP customers recognise their inability to handle the resulting problems

- VoIP security vendors are working with service provider customers to implement VoIP security offerings on a managed services basis

- SIP trunking is seen as a tremendously high-growth market, making it one of the most susceptible to security threats in the coming months