Unified Communications (UC)
platforms, such as Microsoft Lync Server, Office Communications
Server, Cisco Unified Presence, and IBM Lotus Sametime, provide
enterprises with the ability to manage multiple communications
modalities over an IP infrastructure to deliver improved
collaboration, cost savings, and increased efficiency through rapid
decision-making. At its fullest extent, UC encompasses every
technology that integrates voice with other communications
applications - email, instant messaging, presence, Web and video
conferencing, and more.
The need for time-sensitivity and speed in communications has
always been critical to success in business, and meeting security
and compliance needs is equally importance - from preventing
malware and information loss over IM to meeting regulatory,
corporate governance, and e-Discovery requirements across all UC
channels. Actiance provides Unified Communications security,
management, and compliance solutions to help organizations derive
all the collaborative benefits of UC without sacrificing efficiency
gains, network security, or corporate policy standards.
The Security and Compliance Challenge
Regardless of whether an enterprise-grade UC platform has been
deployed, users will continue to introduce real-time consumer
applications into the enterprise, leaving IT to manage an extremely
complex and heterogeneous environment.
While UC delivers a measure of security within the application,
those capabilities are not always sufficient to meet security,
compliance, and e-Discovery requirements. And while the use of
consumer Web applications continues alongside UC deployments, those
tools are hitchhiking on corporate network channels, introducing
additional security concerns. They're using identities that can't
be verified, so authentication and content filtering policies can't
be applied to any information (conversation or files) traversing
that channel. Public IM network connections use tunneling and
port-hopping mechanisms to evade firewalls and prevent anti-malware
products from checking the traffic stream for any malicious
code.
Actiance Secures the UC Infrastructure
Securing, managing, and controlling the UC platform is a
corporate imperative for multiple reasons:
- Introduction of malware - Real-time channels
are increasingly targeted by malware, with blended threats hopping
from public to enterprise networks.
- Increasingly damaging malware - Not only are
more attacks entering the network over real-time channels, but the
attacks themselves are becoming more damaging. Crimeware, rootkits,
exploits, and other malware are designed to bypass traditional
security measures, and real-time communications channels only make
that task easier.
- Spam over IM (SpIM) - Just as malware is
moving to the real-time communications platform to bypass existing
security measures, spam is moving beyond the email inbox into the
real-time stream, further increasing the risk of accidental malware
introduction as well as increasing the traffic load.
- Legislative compliance - Compliance
regulations, including e-Discovery, largely apply to real-time
communications conversations and chat threads, just as they do to
email records. Companies need to be able to "connect the dots" for
all types of electronic communications, particularly when the
installation spans multiple sites.
- Leakage of intellectual property and other key
confidential information - In the same way that malware
can hop across peer-to-peer connections unchallenged, proprietary
information that is left unchallenged and unchecked may leak out of
an organization through unmonitored channels.
Actiance enables
organizations and individuals to utilize Unified Communications in
a secure and compliant fashion. To learn more, select one of
the following options:
To find out more about Actiance and how our business can
actively enable your use of Unified Communications, call us at
1-888-349-3223
or email info@actiance.com.