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To the average small business, VoIP may seem like an esoteric technology that will be difficult to adopt. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Company telephone equipment doesn’t become obsolete. Although there are dedicated business voip phone system, the system can be used with traditional telephones. The operation of the phone system is the same as a traditional system. Customers, vendors and other incoming callers dial the number just like they did before. They won’t even realize the telephone system is changed. Outgoing calls also operate the same way and your staff won’t need to learn new technology just to make a phone call.

The only thing you need to learn is how to take voip advantages of the new found freedom and flexibility the business small business pbx phone offers. The One Number Follow Me feature that you can specify who and when people could reach you at which phone number; The Voice Mail that sent to your cell phone so you can see it and listen to it at the right time; The Auto Attendant that directs the calls to the right person at different hour of the day; Employees working from home, even at different state, etc…

What Are The Downsides to VoIP?

There are few limitations to Small business pbx system over traditional phone systems. The biggest concern is if your internet connection goes down you lose your phone service as well. And the internet connection may have lag that isn’t noticeable in normal web surfing or downloading but makes back-and-forth conversations slow and frustrating.

To overcome the limitation, many VoIP small business provide legacy phone ports so you can still connect a few traditional phone lines to the system. The small voip phone system will automatically route the calls to the best available one according to the pre-configured rules. So when the internet connection is down, the phone service can still be available.

For businesses that cannot afford to have a dedicated IT personnel to keep their network always at its best shape, many business voice services again provide an alternative by using traditional phone network in house, and only using the Internet/network to provide voice over internet protocol services when it is necessary. – Like connecting voip phone service provider or employees work at home using IP extensions. So even the in house network connection is somehow affected by virus or malfunctioned equipment, the phone system can still function well.

Overall, software voip has far more advantages than disadvantages and some experts predict it is only a matter of time until analog phone systems go the way of the rotary dial.

AVAD Technologies specializes in the small/medium sized business market. Hosted VoIP PBX Installation is all we do. AVAD provides complete voip phone plans solutions, we provide local and toll free phone numbers, the VoIP hardware and software, plus free installation and ongoing support. If you are thinking about switching your business to VoIP or just have some questions, please feel free to call (800) 733-4136.

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Monday, 14 March 2011 07:04

How Secure is Your VoIP Network

Written by Avad Technologies

voice over internet protocol services

The most threatening attacks for voice over internet protocol providers and enterprises are those that can degrade the quality of voice, thus rendering the service useless. The simplest way to achieve voice quality degradation is through Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

VoIP communication brings another dimension into the security challenge by introducing both control (signaling) and content (voice) parallel channels which together form the business voip telephone service. The dependence of these channels on one another drastically increases the risk that VoIP service can be damaged, as each one of the channels has its own vulnerabilities. It doesn’t matter which vulnerability is exploited because the attack renders the whole service useless.

Hosted VoIP PBX phone service is revolutionizing how the world communicates, individuals, and businesses are embracing the capabilities and harnessing the power of the internet. Despite voice over IP being a great technological breakthrough, ip office manager, security is still a major concern, yet with the proper precautions it should not have to be.

Most users implementing VoIP these days are primarily concerned about voice quality, latency and interoperability. However we shouldn’t overlook the security risks that can crop up when the voice and data worlds converge, users and analysts say.

VoIP Hackers can have racked up tens of thousands in charges

With VoIP Solutions for small business, voice traffic is carried over a packet-switched data network via Internet Protocol. VoIP networks treat voice as another form of data but use sophisticated voice-compression algorithms to ensure optimal bandwidth utilization. As a result, VoIP networks are able to carry many more voice calls than traditional switched circuit networks. Small business voip solutions also enable enhanced services such as unified communications.

Securing voice traffic on such networks isn’t very different from securing any data traffic on an IP network. In a VoIP world, private branch exchanges are replaced by server-based IP PBXs running on Windows NT or a vendor’s proprietary operating system. Such call management boxes, which are used both for serving up voip call center solutions for business and for logging call information, are susceptible to virus attacks and hackers. Break-ins of these servers could result in the loss or compromise of potentially sensitive data. Consequently, it’s important that such managed voip solutions is properly locked down, placed behind firewalls, patched against vulnerabilities and frequently monitored using intrusion-detection systems.

The University of Houston went one step further and made sure that its call manager and its entire VoIP network aren’t directly accessible from the Internet. The school has put its IP PBXs in a different domain than its other servers and has limited administration access to the servers.

VoIP gateway technologies are also a potential weak point. When VoIP for businesses is used externally, gateway technologies convert data packets from the IP network into voice before sending them over a public switched telephone network. When VoIP is used internally, the gateways basically route packetized voice data between the source and the destination.

The concern here is that such gateways can be hacked into by malicious attackers in order to make free small business pbx phone calls. The trick to protecting against this lies in having strict access-control lists and making sure the gateway is configured in such a fashion that only the people on this list are permitted to make and receive VoIP calls.

As with traditional telephony, eavesdropping is a concern for organizations using VoIP-and the consequences can be greater. Because voice travels in packets over the data network, hackers can use data-sniffing and other hacking tools to identify, modify, store and play back voice traffic traversing the network.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that securing a VoIP infrastructure involves nothing that is drastically different from the measures corporations have always taken to protect their data. To sum up, there are a few simple things any corporation can take to protect their voip calling plans and VoIP network, firstly separating and isolating voice traffic onto a virtual LAN is one way of mitigating the risk, of unauthorized access. Secondly using access lists that define exactly who is entitled to access the network will stamp out external threats. Finally using encryption, as you should with any sensitive data, adds another layer to your secure communication.

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