Interop Reporter's Notebook: VoIP security still spotty

Heard in and around Interop this week:

VoIP security still spotty

A frank assessment of the state of VoIP and security technologies came from Gregory Lebovitz, technical director and solutions architect at Juniper Networks, at an Interop session on Tuesday.

“No [intrusion-prevention system] or firewall vendor supports all VoIP protocols and technologies," said Lebovitz, whose company’s products claim to offer a measure of security for VoIP nets. “If [security vendors] are telling you that they support all VoIP technologies they’re lying. There just isn’t anyone who supports everything today."

Lebovitz said users must ask security product vendors what specific VoIP equipment and protocols are supported on their intrusion detection/prevention systems and firewall; product names and numbers should be asked, and users should test these combinations of security and VoIP gear in a lab before buying.

“It’s not that we’re not trying; we want to get there," Lebovitz said. “But there’s only [so little] resources being devoted to write [so much of the] code that will be needed to get there."

Cisco’s Chambers moves into world politics

While CEOs from Juniper and CA gave keynote talks the Interop conference in New York this week, Cisco CEO John Chambers apparently has better things to do — such as rubbing elbows with world leaders at the Clinton Global Initiative conference, which is taking place in the city this week. Chambers was expected to join First Lady Laura Bush, Bill and Melinda Gates, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, Lance Armstrong and 900 other invited guests at Bill Clinton’s high-powered powwow, with topics such as world poverty, climate change and religious and ethnic conflict on the agenda. Chambers and his entourage were seen Wednesday morning entering the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers, where the conference was held — and where a significant portion of Interop attendees were staying. Show-goers said getting a cab to Interop’s venue at the Javits Centerl was challenging, as security personnel and black SUVs made a tight ring around the 7th Avenue hotel.

WAN optimization vs. thin clients

One Interop session pitted the optimization and thin client options against each other as means to “slim down branch offices" and reduce poor performance to distributed locations, especially for companies that have consolidated data centers or centralized their applications. Despite a discussion that had panelists debating the merits of tunneling traffic, compressing encrypted content and caching dynamic data, no technology came out on top.

The panel included speakers from Silver Peak, Expand Networks, Riverbed and Citrix.

One audience member representing Cisco was able to add his thoughts on the growing market, albeit with some healthy competitive digs from panelists. Cisco recently joined more than a dozen vendors battling for WAN optimization dollars with its Wide-Area Application Service -- if with some healthy competition. While some criticized Cisco for coming a bit late to the market, others pointed out the market is immature and bound to be dramatically different within three years.