Interop Reporter's Notebook: VoIP security still spotty
Observations from our reporters at Interop New York. Check back for updates through the week.
By Network World staff
,
Network World
, 09/20/2006
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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.
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