An IDC survey of 350 SMBs (500 or fewer employees) found that just 50 percent of the businesses trust the security offered today by IP telephony product and solution vendors. That's a slight improvement from a year ago, when 48 percent of SMBs surveyed said they trusted IP telephony security.
But IP telephony still lags behind traditional telephony systems (82 percent), Ethernet data networks (72) percent and wireless local area networks (60 percent) in the security confidence level SMBs have, according to the CompTIA survey.
"People are much more sensitized to disruptions in voice communications than they are with data communications," said John Venator, president and chief executive officer, CompTIA. "If the delivery of an email is delayed by 30 seconds, neither the message sender nor the receiver is likely to notice. But a 30-second gap in the middle of a phone call is another story entirely.
"Even a brief interruption in voice service can have disastrous consequences for an organization, in lost business, downtime, customer dissatisfaction, or negative publicity," Venator added. "That's why it is incumbent on IP telephony vendors and solution providers to place security at the forefront of their offerings, and not leave it as an afterthought."
When IP telephony and related technologies were in their infancy with relatively few deployments, hackers and criminals had little interest in attacking these networks. As the technology has gained broader acceptance in both the business and consumer markets, new and ever-more sophisticated security threats have arisen.
The same types of attacks that plague the data environment -- viruses, worms and Trojan horses are a few examples -- can impact an IP-based communications environment as well. Because voice and data communications are running on the same infrastructure, the entire availability of the IP network could be at compromised, putting at risk an organization's ability to communicate via either voice or data. If security considerations make the quality of IP telephony unacceptable, it becomes a barrier to conducting business. The organization's IT department must be vigilant and aware of new and changing threats to IP-based communications systems.
CompTIA commissioned IDC to survey individuals involved in purchasing voice and data communications systems for companies with 20 to 500 employees.
More information on the study is available at http://www.comptia.org/sections/research/default.aspx.
