Tag Archives: PBX

Improve Performance While Lowering Costs

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Expertly meshed information technology and voice technology services are the perfect combination of near term problem solving and long term competitive opportunities for organizations today.  Delivered across a redundant and highly performing mesh infrastructure, mesh services have proven to lower or completely eliminate technology ownership problems, while improving the customer experience and productivity gains.  Industry leading technologies and technology talent are available in any fraction or combination to fit your exact operational and budgetary expectations.



Intellectual Property On Demand – meshIP

Make good decisions or bad decisions.  There are more advancing and powerful technologies available in the market than most organizations or executives stay keep abreast of – let alone effectively leverage or turn into a strategy.  The meshIP service offers technology seasoned experts to validate or map your technology strategy, address and achieve operational excellence, execute a winning financial strategy, or sales and marketing counseling to leverage the most advanced strategies and technologies.  Compare this service to a CEO, CFO, CIO, or CMO on demand.

Consumable Desktop, Servers, and Cloud Applications – meshDESK

Spend too much to own, or only pay as you go.  Every day a host of advanced technologies and services improve in environments owned and operated by technology companies.  If you are not a technology company, chances are you are wasting money.  The meshDESK service takes responsibility for cost, compliance, and spending risk so you do not have to.  Leverage simple to access hardware, storage, applications, and security controls that can grow or shrink month-to-month.  Compare this service to your utility company relationship.  You only pay when you turn on the lights.

Highly Agile Voice Communications On Demand – meshPBX

If you are not communicating how your customers want your competitors will.  Aging systems and limited agility are proving to drive unnecessary reinvestment and long term capital risk.  Today, customers demand predictable voice and messaging access. Advanced voice technologies make this simple and possible.  The meshPBX service combines enterprise system functions with low cost network utilization, while incorporating voice to email and other messaging opportunities.  Compare this to 911.  When they need you, you are there.

Our mesh services are uniquely architected for sole proprietors and global enterprise utilization alike.  Desktop applications, storage, business continuation and security are offered at $99 per month per user.  meshPBX features and voice network utilization including long distance start at $29 per month per user.  Simply add or remove users as needed.   Please contact us today for a tailored evaluation and quotation.  The savings can start immediately and your competitive technology position is guaranteed to be future proofed.

www.meshIP.com

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meshIP Launches Two New Services!

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meshIP, LLC is please to announce the launch of two new services! meshIP was formed five years ago and has specialized in company formation, business plan development, funding and growth strategies. We are adding to our capabilities to assist small and mid-sized firms in their growth by offering hosted computing and telecommunications services. These offerings allow our clients to get out of the IT business and focus on their business.

Our meshDESK service offering  allows businesses to end the cycle of information technology overspending and support frustration by moving your users to on demand access of our global application and infrastructure cloud.

Cloud computing is enabling customers to access IT services without any infrastructure investment or any services deployed in-house. meshDESK is an integrated service that takes complex services and makes them simply consumable to businesses and agencies.

Our meshPBX service offering is an advanced telephone system platform that is owned and operated within the best data centers in the world – so you can safely transfer your operational needs and risk to us, while enjoying exceptional pricing.

Most importantly, meshPBX is highly configurable to demanding and unusual collaboration environments, while providing a long list of standard elements to meet your expectations of high mobility, messaging integration, security, and audit.

We are excited to be offering these two new services. Please check out www.meshIP.com to learn more about our capabilities

Cloud VoIP Services

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Historically, business telecommunications has been a highly exclusive club of well-financed service providers who have been highly dependent upon business models that are pegged to over-subscription, product bundling and oligopolistic market control.

Telecommunications infrastructure has been a world of very expensive, highly proprietary equipment and telecom applications such as voicemail, conferencing, three-way calling and caller ID have been developed exclusively within the doors of the large service providers who intended to put them in the market.

The nearly simultaneous advent of open telecommunications software platforms (and their expansive feature-sets), server virtualisation, ubiquitous and affordable high speed Internet access and cloud network architectures has created a unique moment in time for the telecommunications industry and one could argue that this business will never be the same.

A scant five years ago, a business shopping for telecommunications products or services would have only a handful of options. Analog lines or a PRI connected to a proprietary PBX and either a best efforts Internet connection such as DSL or one or more T1s of Internet access.

Today, a business with an Internet connection of acceptable speed and quality can select from a wide array of cloud-based telecommunications services sized exactly to their needs. These services bring new capabilities at an affordable price and are powered in no small part by open source technologies deployed in the cloud by an army of upstart service providers exploiting these new technological opportunities.

The result: an “unbundling” of telecommunications services that provides the consumer choice, flexibility and functionality not available from the conventional telecommunications companies. Today, the availability of new infrastructure designs has accelerated the deployment of scalable open source communications frameworks. Increasingly, these tools are being utilised inside of large carrier and enterprise communications network for their cost-efficiency, scalability and flexibility.

The combination of the cloud and open source communications platforms has also birthed an exciting new application marketplace where creative new business models are being developed on a near daily basis. Companies that enable the underlying service of these applications (think ifbyphone, Twilio or Tropo) are acting as cloud “facilitators” for a new generation of applications being developed by both new business models and existing businesses that are developing their own telephony applications.

Many of these “telephony API suppliers” are powered under the hood by the same open source communications frameworks that are seeing increased adoption in recent years. None of these things were attainable by the average business five years ago and we have open telecom frameworks in the cloud to thank.

So what does all of this mean? Aside from the obvious benefits of choice, features and price reduction these technological advances place greater control in the hands of the consumer. A great example of this shift in control is the freedom made possible through Google’s free voice service.

By using Google Voice, you can separate your phone number from your provider’s control and arbitrarily move from one mobile or land line service provider to another without the need to port out or port in a phone number.

Additionally, the Google Voice service includes a bunch of free functionality such as voicemail transcription, dynamic call routing, in-call transfers, custom greetings, call blocking and web access to all of the above. Clearly, services like Google Voice are focused on empowering the user, not locking them into single provider and/or owning them.

Where consumers used to be lured to telecom companies by bundled product offerings and the promise of “savings” for buying everything in one place, the cloud now allows them the ability to save substantial amounts of money each month by purchasing their services over the Internet on an ad-hoc basis.

Toll-based products such as long distance and international calling have been disrupted by cloud services like Skype and Google Voice. As this market transformation has only just begun and the ways in which it will impact conventional telecommunications are not completely clear, it is safe to assume that cloud services will gain market share from the incumbents as the result of their capability, flexibility and affordability. The only uncertainty is how and when the conventional telecoms will respond.

Author: Bryan Johns
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Voice Networks Make Botnet Control Easy

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Botnets and their masters can communicate with each other by calling into the same VoIP conference call and swapping data using touch tones, researchers demonstrated at Defcon.

This gives the botmasters, whose top goals include remaining anonymous, the ability to issue orders from random payphones and disposable wireless handsets, said researchers Itzik Kotler and Iftach Ian Amit of security and risk assessment firm Security Art.

Using phones and the public phone networks eliminates one of the prime tools bot fighters have: taking down the domains of botnets’ command and control servers, the researchers say. If the botmaster isn’t using a command and control server, it can’t be taken down.

In fact, the botmaster can communicate with the zombie machines that make up the botnet without using the Internet at all if the zombies are within a corporate network. So even if a victim company’s VoIP network is segregated from the data network, there is still a connection to the outside world.

In addition to its stealth, the VoIP tactic employs technology that readily pierces corporate firewalls and uses only traffic that is difficult for data loss prevention software to peer into. The traffic is streamed audio, so data loss prevention scanners can’t recognise patterns of data they are supposed to filter, the researchers say.

The downsides of VoIP as a command channel are that it severely limits the number of zombie machines that can be contacted at once, and the rate at which stolen data can be sent out of a corporate network is limited by the phone system. But Kotler and Amit say the connections are plenty big to send commands in.

During their demo at the conference, the pair had an Asterisk open source IP PBX stand in as the corporate PBX. A virtual machine representing a zombie computer on a corporate network called via TCP/IP through the PBX and into a corporate conference call. A BlackBerry representing the botmaster dialled in over the public phone network to the same conference call.

The researchers then used Moshi Moshi open source software to communicate between the botmaster phone and the zombie machine. Moshi Moshi includes a translator that converts commands into DTMF touch tones as input, and converts stolen data from text to speech for output. The resulting voice traffic is phoned into a voice mailbox that the botmaster can pick up whenever it’s convenient.

One tricky part is configuring the PBX to allow DTMF tones to pass through into the conference. Another is that the botmaster has to create a DTMF-based language that the bots are programmed to understand.

The researchers say their demonstration was merely a proof of concept, and that it could work much better with refinements. For instance, incorporating modem technology into the scheme could result in faster exfiltration rates than sending speech generation voicemails.

To defend against this type of VoIP abuse, Kotler and Amit recommend separating VoIP from the corporate network altogether in order to prevent compromised computers from tapping into conference calls. They recommend monitoring VoIP activity to discover unauthorised use of conference calls, say after business hours. And they say conference calls should be whitelisted, allowing access only from authorised IP addresses and phone numbers.

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VoIP Hacking About To Hurt Businesses?

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Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a subculture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. As telephone networks have become computerised or based on VoIP, phreaking has become closely linked with computer hacking. But is VoIP hacking about to hurt businesses?

Apr 11, Western Australia Police warned the state’s businesses to change passwords and cap international calls on enterprise VoIP networks, after investigating several cases of scammers hacking the networks to commit fraud. The WA Police said three businesses have reported their VoIP networks hacked by opportunists using the networks to make calls to international numbers offering premium voice services – often owned by the attacker.

In total, the three businesses were set to have suffered losses of some $70,000 from the attacks. Similar methods were used in early 2009 in an attack that caused one small business to run up a $120,000 bill.

In Feb 11, an incident closer to home saw fraudsters hacking into two Guernsey firms’ phone answering systems leaving them with bills for £28,000. The companies targeted in the phone ‘phreaking’ attacks were in the finance and legal sectors and had their systems hijacked over one weekend.

Guernsey Police’s Commercial Fraud Department, said fraudsters guessed the password to the answerphone accounts and were then able to make calls all over the world, including to North Korea and Somalia. Experts think ‘sophisticated “war diallers” and “password crackers” were the more likely method used to gain illegal access.

Most of us don’t know and are not aware of the dangers of VoIP and the more widely that VoIP is being implemented across businesses the larger the danger.

As demonstrated, security breaches on VoIP systems already include the stealing of telephone numbers and using them to make calls which appear on a business’ phone bill. Take the example of premium rate numbers such as 09 numbers that yield revenue for the carrier and the company that set up the number. The phone operator pays the firm as much as 90% of the generated revenue.

The scam normally involves a bogus operation, registered outside the EU, to hack into an unsuspecting business’ PBX at a time when no one is working and once in hackers programme the PBX to automatically make these premium rate calls. No one is aware of the scam until much later as evidenced in the examples before.

Industrial competition is another area where we could potentially see a competing company or a third-party/hacktivist block a competitor’s phone system and occupy phone lines. The phone system can be hacked to create a denial of service attack, preventing outbound calls from being made – suspending a competitor’s ability to make calls which might require days to fix.

With spam taking up 80 percent of internet traffic – spam on the phone line could be the next major headache for businesses. While emails can be deleted in seconds if spam ever came on a phone line it would be a different story. Every time a phone rings in a business it is answered and most firms are unable to distinguish a genuine call from spam. With no real urgency shown by telcos to tackle the problem it can take months to resolve the issue by which time the spammer has made their money.

VoIP will make it easier to tap into phone calls so we could well see more incidents of phone-hacking. The idea of not securing VoIP network is almost as dangerous as using an internet connection without a firewall. However, there are technical solutions out there that can help. Enterprise Session Border Controllers (E-SBC) can be deployed to protect the network from harm – we just need to start using them. It also helps if businesses set up the telephony system properly and incorporate the right controls to make changes.

VoIP hacking will hurt business but the best way to protect ourselves is to ensure the security is up to the job.

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SMB Trends For Hosted VoIP Services

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Here are the results from a recent Virtual PBX survey that asked more than 600 SMBs about virtual office use — along with the perceived effectiveness, costs, and technology needed to support a virtual business.

The most popular drivers for using a virtual office included: employees’ flexibility (61%), business cost savings (54%), geographic distance of staff (42%) and the desire to reduce commute time, cost and pollution (41%). More 60% of respondents work from a virtual office almost all the time, while 27% work two to 10 days a month outside the office.

The survey showed that virtual workers are apparently addicted to cellphones — 87% survey takers use mobile devices for business communications. Also popular are landlines, used by 49%; VoIP phone lines, used by 25%; and computer-based VoIP soft phones, used by 20% of respondents.

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Network & VoIP Security Tips

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For anyone who has an internet connection, paying attention to your network security should be one of the most important things you can do. With a well maintained and managed network, you won’t need to worry about viruses or compromising sensitive data and access. Here are some simple steps you can take to make sure that you are protected:

1. Install and use a credible Anti-spyware, Anti-virus software package

Spyware can present a major problem, especially in the form of key loggers that steal your passwords so make sure that your anti-virus and anti-spyware definitions are kept up-to-date, and run regular full system scans.

2. Keep your Operating System updated

Updates are critical to the security and reliability of your computer. Some of these updates address bugs and potential exploits in your computer, so you should keep your operating system up to date to ensure you’re have the latest protection.

3. Secure your Wireless connection

* Use WPA2 encryption. This is better than other encryption methods.
* Hide your SSID or change its name to something non-descript or common (i.e. “Router1”)
* Change the default admin username and password on your modem router with strong, varied usernames and passwords (then document them and store them in a safe place)
* Use MAC address filtering to limit wireless access to only those devices whose MAC addresses are allowed
* If you don’t use wireless networking, then turn it off

4. Configure and use a Firewall

Firewalls require some advanced configuration to work properly with some games and software, but it is well worth your time to configure and use them. Firewalls help protect against malicious software and prevent people from traveling through your internet connection to compromise your local network by limiting which ports can be used, from what source IP address, and what type of traffic. It’s recommended that you start with a block-all policy and then add rules to allow access from trusted or known sources.

5. Common threats

* Never open email attachments, email links or instant messages from people you don’t know.
* Be careful about accessing your network from shared computers or public networks (wireless hotspots)
* Be careful when web browsing. Downloading torrents or unauthorised versions of software is one of the easiest ways to undo your network security.

6. VoIP Security

Protecting your computers from online threats is essential, as is protecting all devices that use and are connected to the internet. To make sure that your system is more resilient to network attacks and fraud, we recommend you do the following:

* Protect the administration and remote management interface by using a strong password and a non-standard access port. Treat them like credit card numbers and keep them confidential
* Use alphanumeric passwords and usernames, and make them different from your extensions; especially if you have remote extensions or Direct Inward Service Access (DSIA)
* Block outbound dialling from your voicemail system to prevent Dial Through Fraud (DTF)
* Only allow SIP authentication and inbound call requests from trusted IP addresses. Block all others
* Restrict the destinations phones can call by configuring dial plans, call routes, and user access
* Make use of an intrusion detection system (IDS) and actively monitor your calls
* Delete employee authorisation codes when they leave your company
* If you are selling or discarding your VoIP hardware, make sure that you factory reset it and check that all SIP authentication usernames and passwords have been removed

Failing to secure your PBX or VoIP adapter may result in the following:

* Toll Fraud – utilising your PBX or account details to make calls at your expense
* Obtain unauthorised access to your system resources, information, privileges and/or listening to your calls and voicemail (through fuzzing, sniffing, or brute force attacks)
* Denial of Service – disabling your voice communication using packet floods

These security steps are critical to ensure your protection against internet attackers. If you require assistance configuring or implementing any of these recommendations, contact a certified and credible IT professional or PBX system integrator.

By setting up your network properly and using reliable security policies and procedures, you can sleep more soundly and feel confident that your computers, network, and phones, are as safe as possible.

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VoIP Migration Leads to Savings

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Small businesses looking to ditch old PBX landline phones can save big and increase staff productivity by migrating to Internet-based phone systems.

The telephone switchboard and landline desk phone may not be dead, but they are becoming relics of the past along with office ashtrays and typewriters.

Businesses are increasingly turning away from PBX (private branch exchange) phone systems and toward VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) telephony, which enables conversations to travel as data across the Internet. By 2013 more than 80 percent of businesses will use VoIP, according to research by In-Stat.

Is VoIP Right for You?

VoIP can be ideal if your company handles many calls among multiple people, has mobile employees, or juggles satellite offices. Implementing the technology can help to shrink or eliminate the cost of long-distance and conference calls.

In addition, VoIP provides the flexibility to manage calls as you would other data. For example, a caller’s contact information may pop up on a Web-based dashboard or on a smartphone with a VoIP app when they ring your number. Depending on the service, voice calls can be translated to text that you read via e-mail or on a smartphone. Many VoIP services extend beyond voice to encompass instant messaging, virtual meetings, and videoconferencing. VoIP is key to unified communications efforts to integrate all of your correspondence into a single, digital hub.

If you already have a local or wide-area network, then you’ve already laid much of the groundwork. Make sure that your organization has enough bandwidth–a T1 line or better–before trying to cram your calls through a sluggish data pipeline.

VoIP Options

What kind of VoIP system you need depends on the size of your business and the number of locations. One person working at home probably doesn’t need much more than a consumer service such as Skype, ViaTalk, or Vonage. Just sign up, download the app, don a headset, and you’re good to go. Skype even offers encryption to keep calls private. Mobile VoIP apps can help you rein in cell phone bills.

But that’s not enough if you need individual phone lines for your employees. In this case, the many VoIP options essentially break down to either a hosted or on-site VoIP service. Hybrid services can blend the two, letting you combine old and new equipment.

Research firm Frost & Sullivan projects that hosted VoIP will grow by 30 percent and on-premise by 12 percent over the next five years.

Hosted VoIP leaves the heavy technology lifting to another company. It can help a small business appear bigger by offering PBX-style features, such as individual phone numbers for employees and call transfers, even to workers away from their desks. It can include toll-free numbers and integration with e-mail and faxing software. You basically download software and buy or lease IP phones for each user. There’s little need to invest in expensive equipment or to pay an IT pro for ongoing support.

By contrast, on-premise VoIP will offer all the features of a hosted service, with the option for fine-tuning. Avaya and Cisco are among the vendors to consider. For this VoIP PBX option, however, you’ll have to handle all the hardware and the calls, so it’s time to call an IT pro. If you’re upgrading from a pure PBX system, a VoIP gateway device on your network can make the transition. Once you have VoIP going on your network, you should optimize your router and your network to prioritize traffic to ensure high call quality.

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SIP Trunking Gets Serious

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Regular attendees of the Enterprise Connect conference (formerly VoiceCon) couldn’t help but notice that this year everyone was talking — and talking more seriously — about implementing session initiated protocol (SIP) trunking. Although other conference topics such as Unified Communications and mobility may have been more glamorous, SIP trunking was often in the background as an enabling technology that can make those things work, or work better.

SIP is an Internet standard for establishing and managing voice and video connections and is commonly used within organizations that have implemented voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) telephony. With SIP trunking, it also becomes the means of placing calls over carrier networks, allowing enterprises to consolidate their carrier trunk connections from many offices to a smaller number of data centers or communications hubs. They can then avoid long distance tolls by routing more calls over their wide-area networks.

“A lot of people are trying to save costs — that’s a major factor,” said Courtney A. Mobley, an information systems coordinator from George Washington University who is working on a SIP trunking project. The preliminary engineering work has already been done, and the university is testing an initial implementation. “I think it’s going to happen in the next year,” he said.

Mobley said he was at the conference looking for practical tips, both in terms of understanding what users are looking for from Unified Communications and the kind of troubleshooting he will need to do to keep them happy. The university is already starting to deal with some of these challenges as more staff members rely on the IP network for voice. “If you can prove where the problem is and get the right people who need to solve the problem, that’s really important,” he said.

Mobley was among a hardy group of conference goers who got up early on Thursday, the last day of the conference, for a “coffee talk” discussion of the practicalities of SIP trunking. Sorrell Slaymaker, VP of communications architecture at Unified IT Systems, led a question and answer session on building the business case, getting the implementation right, and putting the right support in place.

SIP trunking is not an initiative to be taken on lightly, Slaymaker said. “Voice is one of those critical applications where if it doesn’t work, everyone is unhappy.” Although vendors make very expansive claims for return on investment, Slaymaker said the biggest savings he has ever seen from the transition is 70% — with 45% to 50% being more common. Some of the savings are diminished by the “cleanup” aspects of the transition, such as chasing down and eliminating all the individual phone connections a big organization has established over the decades.

The business case is most compelling for large organizations with thousands of telephone trunks to replace. That also means it tends to be a multi-year process, since it’s impractical to convert more than a handful of sites per week, Slaymaker said.

Among the questions raised by IT and network managers were how to handle fax lines, how to troubleshoot problems, and how much of the work can be delegated to a carrier, rather than implemented internally.

Slaymaker said many business processes and many older workers still depend on the departmental fax machine, so converting them to IP has to be part of the project. Some organizations run into trouble trying to implement voice compression on their VoIP systems, which tends to interfere with fax transmission. He doesn’t recommend voice compression anyway because “it doesn’t buy you much” and risks degrading voice quality.

For troubleshooting, his top recommendation is to include border session controller appliances as part of the network architecture. These are often included to improve security, but also offer monitoring functions that make it easier to trace problems with dropped or low-quality sessions. Acme Packet and Sonus Networks are two of the best specialty vendors in that niche, he said.

SIP trunking requires a “rock solid” wide-area network between branch offices and the data centers that will be routing calls, Slaymaker said. If your WAN is not up to the task, consider having a carrier provide it as a managed service, he said. “You don’t necessarily have to have a private MPLS [multiprotocol label switching] network — the carriers will give you very good SLAs [service-level agreements] if you are using their Internet [connectivity] on both sides,” he said.

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VMware`s Mobile Virtualization Solution Available on Android

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VMware, a provider of virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions, announced the launch of its mobile virtualization solution that is expected to offer a personal as well as separate secure profile for work applications on a single Android phone.

The virtualization software was demonstrated on LG Optimus Black at the Mobile World Congress. VMware is currently working with LG to pre-load the software. The company will start the trials of the software by the middle of this year.

The objective is to let employees buy mobile devices of their choice, but Mobile virtualization technology from VMware will allow corporate IT departments to manage sensitive data on those devices with enterprise-level security and compliance.

“We want to move to a world where the company is not buying you a phone,” said Stephen Herrod, chief technology officer, VMware, in a statement. “Buy what you like and bring it to work and we`ll give you a way to use it in an enterprise-safe way. As it is not possible to download the application later, so manufacturers need to pre-load the software in the device.”

The application will appear on the home screen of the phone and when the user touches it, it will launch the corporate version of the phone. VMware is offering flexible options to IT administrators. IT administrators can work in line with the company policies and may provide different employees with different capabilities.

In line with the security issues of the company, the user can shut off security sensitive items such as cameras, Bluetooth, GPS and cut/copy options. Removal of such applications will discourage employees from misusing of applications which are against the interest of the organization.

VMware offers a number of features. An enterprise could allow users to receive voice over IP calls from the PBX on the phones having different ring tones from the ones coming in their personal side.

VMware also offers dual SIM option. With dual SIM option, a user can have two separate corporate and personal accounts which may reduce data traffic for both.

According to VMware, the mobile virtualization application on the phone will be free but the enterprises will pay per user for the management software.

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