Cisco tightens security on voice products
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Cisco Systems announces an upgrade to its CallManager software to improve security on its IP telephony gear.
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Aiming to let enterprises do more with their IP (Internet Protocol) telephony systems and keep them available when a network goes down, Avaya Inc. introduced new software, phones and a gateway at this week's VoiceCon Spring conference.
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(InfoWorld) - Aiming to let enterprises do more with their IP (Internet Protocol) telephony systems and keep them available when a network goes down, Avaya introduced new software, phones, and a gateway at this week's VoiceCon Spring conference. On Tuesday, the company announced Avaya Communication Manager 4.0, the latest version of its software platform for enterprise VOIP (voice over IP). At the same time, it unveiled the G860 Media Gateway for large offices and call centers. Avaya also announced three fixed-line phones and said it will provide industry-standard SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) firmware for all its high-end phones. Like other big voice vendors, Avaya is gearing up for increasing adoption of IP telephony, which is on its way to replacing traditional phone systems in enterprises. The Communication Manager 4.0 server software can support 12,000 standard T-1 phone trunks in a company's headquarters and other locations, said Steve Hardy, a director of product marketing at Avaya. That is 1.5 times the number that the previous version could handle. The software also has features to keep enterprise calling features working and maintain call detail records in case of a WAN (wide-area network) failure. It is set to ship this month. The G860 Media Gateway lets enterprises consolidate multiple gateways at a large enterprise site, which are used for communication between the internal VOIP network and the public switched telephone network. It has a T-3 interface -- 45MbpsÂ -- versus the 1.5Mbps links on Avaya's earlier gateways. The G860 also can use SIP, the emerging standard for linking IP telephony devices and integrating voice features with productivity applications. It is set to ship in the third quarter. Also Tuesday, Avaya said its IG550 Integrated Gateway for branch offices, announced last year, will be available this month. It is a module that fits in Juniper Networks Inc. J-series routers. The company fleshed out its 9600 series of high-end IP desk phones, also introduced last year. It announced the 9640 IP Telephone, with a color display, for sales people and other employees who use the phone as a key work tool. The new 9650 is for receptionists and others who manage calls for themselves and other employees, and the 9610 is designed for common areas with simplicity in mind, according to Avaya. The new phones are already shipping and priced at $679, $525, and $215, respectively. Avaya expects to have SIP firmware available as a free software download for all the 9600 series phones beginning in May. One Avaya customer, an IT administrator for a national transportation company, said SIP was a key criterion in his company's choice of an IP telephony system. The company is rolling out Avaya's 9620 and 9630 IP phones to about 40 facilities. SIP should give the company a choice when shopping for additional devices, such as speakerphones, he said. VoiceCon Spring, taking place in Orlando, has been a busy conference for Avaya. Also at the show, it announced the Avaya one-X Portal, a Web browser-based interface for accessing voicemail, managing conference calls, and setting call forwarding to a cell phone, among other things. And Tuesday the company revealed a deal with Lenovo GroupÂ in which Avaya's softphone client will be integrated with Lenovo's fingerprint-scanner security system for logging in to the client. The companies also discussed using the keyboard backlight feature as a message-waiting light for the softphone client in the future. Pricing for Communication Manager starts at $200 per seat. The G860 Media Gateway costs $140,000 list. The IG550 gateway module starts at $3,000 and line cards start at $1,000.
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Protego&#39;s products help enterprises of all sizes manage, monitor and eliminate network security threats. The Protego deal would augment Cisco&#39;s three cash acquisitions of security software startups this year.
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Cisco Systems and Wells Fargo found themselves this week again responding to security breaches nearly identical to ones the two companies faced only months earlier.
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Cisco Systems used the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco to trumpet its transformation from "packet pusher" to "infrastructure" company, unveiling a string of product updates that unify its diverse security portfolio on Monday.
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Cisco Systems Inc has made a slew of announcements, which include beefing up 10Gb connectivity on its switches and launching fan-less compact versions of a couple of its midrange boxes for markets like education, utilities and the public sector.
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But don't just blame Vista New technology such as Windows Vista and IP v6 may solve some security problems but will bring new security threats as well, according to a senior Cisco security expert.â¦
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By buying Protego Networks Monday, Cisco Systems bolstered its growing portfolio of security products, an increasingly important piece of its networking strategy.
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Cisco systems Inc. has teamed up with Cognio Inc. on a system designed to ferret out the source of radio frequency noise that can interfere with WiFi networks.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems used the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco to trumpet its transformation from "packet pusher" to "infrastructure" company, unveiling a string of product updates that unify its diverse security portfolio on Monday. However, the company still has work to do to make that transformation complete and will need to ramp up its outreach to third-party vendors to make initiatives like its SONA (Service Oriented Networking Architecture) and Network Admission Control a reality, analysts and customers say. Cisco announced releases to its ASA (Adaptive Security Appliance) product, IPS, CSA (Cisco Security Agent), CSM (Cisco Security Manager), and MARS (Mitigation Analysis and Response System) products. The enhancements will give enterprises better protection against a new generation of sophisticated and targeted attacks and an evolving "human network" of mobile and Web based technologies, Jeff Platon, Cisco's vice president of security marketing told a room full of reporters and analysts on Monday. "When you think about our role and how it's evolved, we've moved from being a packet pusher to an infrastructure company," Platon said. "And if you look at the trends, Cisco's not going to be a network vendor. Whether its voice or video in the consumer space, those requirements are going to change what Cisco becomes to the marketplace." But key elements of the company's transformation are very much works in progress that will require Cisco to forge close ties with other vendors before they bear fruit. SONA, an effort to create a service-oriented architectural framework that unifies network-based services like security, mobility, and location on virtualized platforms, will require close cooperation with third-party vendors that may be Cisco competitors in some areas, said Richard Palmer, senior vice president of Cisco's Security Technology Unit. "If we allow third-party applications to operate on our platforms like ASA and ISR, it will make for a tighter set of partners and more longevity," Palmer said. Currently, Cisco has a number of teams across the company developing SONA components for functions like authentication and control plane and data plane integration for third-party products to work on platforms like Cisco' ASA, Palmer said.Â  To promote SONA, Cisco will strike more deals like the joint marketing initiative with SAP on governance, risk, and compliance solutions, which it announced in September. Similarly, the company will need to work closely with firms like Microsoft and other third-party vendors on issues like security. Cisco and Microsoft have been hammering out an integration of their two competing NAC frameworks for more than two years, largely at the urging of enterprise customers. Palmer allowed that many enterprise customers may prefer to use features built into Windows Vista in lieu of Cisco's own CSA client software. "Clearly, what we do is driven by customer choice. Customers are saying, 'Look, we're committed to Vista, and we want you to work more closely," he said. However, Palmer said that some customers may still prefer the CSA client for endpoint security. But for Cisco's enterprise customers, choice and integration with other vendors remains a pressing issue. Patricia M. Lawicki, vice president and CIO at Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), a Cisco customer since 1987, said that the company's technology plays a key part in helping PG&E restructure its IT operations after the California electricity crisis of 2000 and 2001 forced the company into bankruptcy. Cisco's technology is helping PG&E with a major business transformation, including the phasing out of mainframe and first-generation client-server applications, a major deployment of technology from SAP, and overhauls of supply chain and customer service systems. While PG&E is using the company's NAC appliance, Cisco's full NAC solution, which requires wholesale upgrades to its networking infrastructure, remains too expensive for PG&E to adopt, especially with the wealth of legacy Cisco hardware that would need to be replaced, Lawicki said. A committed Cisco customer, PG&E still wants to be able to choose best-of-breed solutions -- particularly in areas like security -- and is pushing Cisco and its other suppliers to make that possible, she said.
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Microsoft and Cisco are integrating their security technologies in an effort to isolate computers that are infected with viruses or have other security risks -- thus preventing them from spreading the danger to corporate networks.
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Here's a guide through the many issues involved in hardening your network and Internet infrastructure to get the best results out of a digital voice deployment.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco announced a pair of additions to its Network Admission Control (NAC) product line on Monday, launching new tools that promise to extend the authentication system to a greater variety of devices and office environments. The introductions were timed to coincide with the start of the Security Standard Conference in Chicago, which is owned and operated by InfoWorld's parent company, IDG. They come hot on the heels of Cisco's late-August announcement that Intel will arm computers using its vPro and Centrino microprocessors with the ability to communicate their security posture to corporate networks, even before they have been booted up. Â  Cisco unveiled its Network Module for NAC, which will give customers the ability to implant the authentication system into the vendor's Integrated Services Router (ISR) hardware, along with its NAC Profiler, which is meant to allow users to monitor a greater number of non-PC devices using the security tools. Executives with the San Jose, Calif.-based company said the latest products evidence the company's ongoing work to mature NAC aggressively. "This is an announcement where you see things continue to develop, not only in terms of the types of things that NAC technologies can do, as was the case with the chipset interaction, but also in terms of addressing problems that everyone has, such as getting posture assessments for devices that don't run on Windows," said Brendan O'Connell, senior product manager for Cisco's Security Technology Group. "With the ISR module, we're giving customers the option to push NAC into the branch-office setting, which is something else customers have been asking us for," O'Connell said. "It's all about increasing NAC's ease-of-use and operability." While Cisco is widely credited with inventing NAC technology -- which is identified by other vendors by the more generic term "network access control," and is used to verify a device's identity and security standing as it attempts to connect to a network -- some industry watchers have criticized the manufacturer for not moving faster to introduce products such as its new releases. In addition to expanding the potential footprint of its NAC systems by driving the technology into its ISR hardware, which it has been selling to customers for over three years, Profiler addresses one of the primary security concerns raised with the authentication systems, namely, their ability to identify and monitor IP-connected devices other than desktop and laptop computers. Based on NAC's complexity, some companies have chosen to use branch offices or remote locations to test its impact and efficacy in the field before blending the tools into their central IT networks, Cisco officials said -- exactly the type of scenario the ISR module will seek to facilitate. The ability to add NAC via a blade in the ISR devices will also appeal to small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), the networking giant contends, as will the ability to license the technology for office settings with 50 to 100 users -- the smallest deployment alternative for the tools the vendor has offered to date. Cisco maintains that by offering NAC monitoring for IP-connected machines such as Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) phones and networked printers, companies will no longer be forced to formulate complicated exceptions to test the devices. In adding direct hooks for such equipment into NAC, Cisco claims it has also addressed the perceived security loophole created by the need to create such exemptions, which some have said made it easier for attackers to defeat the authentication systems by spoofing such devices. "It's not just PCs that are connecting to the perimeter of a network where customers need to make these types of decisions, which has been sort of a hole for a while as it was cumbersome to do NAC securely for some of these other devices, and users didn't have much information at their fingertips when they could do it," O'Connell said. "In some customer deployments, over half of the devices on the network are IP phones today, so, Profiler is an important step forward in improving NAC's abilities to that end." Ladi Adefala, security practice manager for World Wide Technology, a St. Louis-based systems integrator that both uses and re-sells Cisco's NAC products, said the new products should help expand the technology's uptake in both larger and smaller customers. Many companies have been looking for ways to test NAC in smaller settings and then extend the tools to a wider set of users, making the Network Module product launch particularly important, he said. The Profiler will eliminate the need for IT shops and service providers like World Wide Technology to port NAC to phones and other devices, a time-consuming process, according to Adefala. Cisco has been actively marketing two approaches to NAC -- using its appliances to provide local protection on networks and also utilizing its top-down network-wide "framework" strategy. This has caused some customers to spend a long time deciding which route to go down, the expert say. However, Adefala contends that more companies are jumping further into NAC as Cisco's products become more mature. "There was some initial confusion with which way to go, but Cisco has been able to get most customers to begin considering it more closely, particularly by marketing the appliance as a one-stop shop for NAC," he said. "I think that will continue to be the case over the next year because of the type of announcements we're seeing here, and more integration with third-party products." One industry analyst echoed those comments, saying Cisco's is making "incremental improvements" with each NAC product release and likely growing its overall customer base for the tools. Cisco's move to launch the NAC Profiler directly addresses a "perceived shortcoming" of the systems in allowing more devices to be tested, while the Network Module will encourage broader deployment among large multinationals and among smaller firms, said Phil Hochmuth, analyst with Boston-based Yankee Group. "They're trying to fit in more places with both the switches and the framework. Obviously a lot more customers are using the [appliances] today because they are easier to deploy, but I think the framework will eventually appeal to some people," Hochmuth said. "They also have all these switches in place, and if they can harness that to sell NAC, that could be pretty powerful. "NAC remains complicated and Cisco has been guilty of playing both sides a bit with the two different approaches, but they know that if they can get customers to adopt it today with the appliances, the eventually might go for the network-wide approach," the analyst said.
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Starting in mid-October AT&amp;T, in partnership with industry-leader Linksys (a division of Cisco Systems (Quote, Chart)), will begin offering Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to home users across the country.
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Cisco is to introduce a line of branch-office routers that integrate basic routing capabilities with IP voice support and security tools.
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Narus Inc. is moving to help service providers scale up their network security.