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Virtually, every company seems to be in a rush to merge email, fax and voice communications. IT, BPO, media, telecom, banking and retail enterprises are embracing unified communications (UC) in a bid to increase productivity, improve customer satisfaction and reduce operational costs.

However, the risks associated with UC security are now beginning to surface as companies start merging their various channels of communications.

There’s no denying the fact that vulnerability from internal and external sources or knowledge workers who wish to exploit networks always exist. Eavesdropping, unauthorised access of messages, unauthorised handsets connecting to the network and disruption of phone network are some of the threats, faced by enterprises.

Minhaj Zia, national sales manager (unified communications), Cisco India & Saarc says, “Some of the threats that UC faces are—open architecture on voice over internet protocol (VoIP) software can be exploited for eavesdropping, packet spoofing, and replay attacks; instant messaging, a highly vulne-rable service, has gained popularity not only on business desktops but also on handhelds and smartphones; access to emails via UC solutions carrying voice or mail attachments is also highly susceptible to attacks.”

As organisations expand in size, their integrated information and communication network also stretches. As a result, they need to unify security components from network, their endpoint tools and management tools into an integrated security system. According to Jayesh Kotak, vice-president, product management, D-Link India, denial of service, spoofing, eavesdropping, signaling and media manipulation are few security threats to the UC. “Attacks are either to bring down a service or hijack a machine for malicious purposes. The application is a soft-target and there are variety of tools available on the internet to try out various kinds of attacks,” says Vivek Shenoy, chief technology officer, Elina Networks.

He adds, “TCP/IP based communications has won over all other competing standards. Today, stopping attacks is a reasonably understood science and there are a host of technologies available for this. One of them is firewall.

Today’s firewalls understand IP protocols, so that filtering can be done at the protocol level. These are called application level gateways.”

It is seen that an integrated security system allows an enterprise to extend their information and communication network and increase their operational efficiency with greater effect.