As demonstrated by last year’s (alleged) HP corporate espionage scandal, businesses will go to great lengths to get the edge on their competition. It has even been reported that some foreign governments eavesdrop on business communications (phone calls, e-mails) to give domestic companies an advantage.
Aside from the typical benefits of VoIP, including cost savings and flexibility, business VoIP solutions can also provide extra security for phone calls against eavesdropping. High value targets might be calls between top executives, discussions of confidential sales strategies, mergers and acquisitions, or the development or launch of a new product.
Companies should already be requiring employees to use an encrypted VPN (virtual private network) to gain access to the corporate intranet. For enterprise VoIP or other in-house implementations, this makes VoIP security easy: Internet phone calls that your employees make from the road are already protected at least back to your company’s network. This, of course, assumes that you have a secure VPN service running that uses strong encryption, such as AES.
Smaller companies using a hosted VoIP solution should check with their providers. If the company doesn’t have any offers, an add-on such as Phil Zimmermann’s zFone might be useful.
While some argue that Skype is a good option because it makes use of encryption, others argue that the encryption is used to protect Skype secrets (it’s not open source) and allow it to pass through filters more easily. Without a professional, independent evaluation of the security features, while Skype offers a good VoIP product, we cannot assume anything about its security.
And don’t forget that phone calls are just one part of the equation. Physical security, shredding documents before discarding them, etc., are as important as ever.
And there are plenty of stories of airline passengers being lucky enough to sit next to a competitor on the way to a sales presentation – a competitor who works with confidential sales materials in plain sight. Listening to Internet phone calls seems like a lot of hassle when presented with this kind of gift!
Post your VoIP security questions below and we’ll answer them in a future story.
