Sigal Russin Pini Cohen

STKI

Summit

2013

Cloud based Contact Center

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Cloud Problems

Source: information week

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Cloud Status

Source: information week

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Cloud Status

Source: information week

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Cloud Adoption Accelerates in 2012

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Business Benefits

Improved business

agility

Lower total cost

of ownership

Decreased capital

expense

flexible scaling

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* In percent

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Cloud Contact Center Concerns

• Security – authentication, back-up, e encryption and secure user/password processes, regulation.

• Performance- quality, availability, inconsistency, bandwidth available and latency, Send critical signals such as SIP, XML, CTI .

• Resilience and Business Continuity- back–up or mirrored location, recovery and resilience.

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Performance & Security

• Time out intervals • Distributed denial of service • Data theft • Trial and error break in • Bank cards fraud • caller ID attack against system (CLI spoofing) • Voice biometric attack • Telephone Switch attack • Phishing Attack – man in the middle • OS compromise

Source: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/288/31879

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Session Border Controller (SBC) A device or application that governs the manner in which called sessions, are initiated, conducted and terminated in a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) network.

Location: a connection point, called a border, between a private local area network (LAN) and the Internet.

It can exist as a single, independent hardware unit containing all of the resources necessary for call signaling and call control.

It can include call filtering, bandwidth use management, firewalls and anti-malware programs to minimize abuse and enhance security.

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SBC Topology

External Cloud

Your Business

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Security measures in SBC

Many contact center managers who operate at a single site see limited value in the migration to voice over IP (VoIP) and will only do so when a vendor declares the existing application's end of life. source: Forrester Research, Inc., Is It Time To Move Your Contact Center to the Cloud? June, 2012

Safeguarding enterprise customer confidentiality and privacy

Improving interoperability by mitigating multi-vendor/multi-protocol interoperability issues

Ensuring better reliability by enforcing service quality and enabling high levels of service availability

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SBC Benefits

• SBCs are able to manage complex call flows between different telecom platforms and multiple carriers’ SIP trunks, using slightly incompatible interfaces, to be interconnected and used on a single enterprise network.

Network Bandwidth Usage Savings

• An SBC can facilitate end-to end encryption if the privacy of sessions is compulsory due to regulatory.

• It is necessary to provide scalable network address translation (NAT) capabilities.

Home Agent Deployment Benefits

• Recording sessions within the SBC at the contact center network edge provides economic and reliability to the enterprise over traditional IP recording methods.

Call Recording Enhancements

Source: http://www.currentanalysis.com/f/2011/ContactCenter-SBC/files/CurrentAnalysis-ContactCenter-SBC.pdf 14

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SBC Benefits

• SBCs are being employed to protect enterprise networks and to maintain appropriate levels of reliability and security when connected to a hosted contact center application by SIP trunking.

• Without security it can be a targets of hackers and can be crippled by denial of service (DoS) attacks.

Hosted/Cloud Contact Center Advantages

• In north America emergency calls be handled with priority and routed appropriately in emergencies.

• An SBC is able to identify emergency priority calls from anywhere within a multi-location, geographically-distributed.

Regulation -E911 Benefits

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Source: http://www.currentanalysis.com/f/2011/ContactCenter-SBC/files/CurrentAnalysis-ContactCenter-SBC.pdf

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SBC-based Solutions

Forrester :“Risk and compliance teams need to audit and approve the cloud contact center service provider’s security procedures and technology to best manage the enterprise’s exposure.” source: Forrester Research, Inc., Is It Time To Move Your Contact Center to the Cloud? June, 2012

Acme Packet Audiocodes Cisco Edgewater Siemens Enterprise Sipera Avaya Others

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Don’t Forget!

Vendor selection

• Performance

• Resilience

• Capability

• Freedom

• Hosting center

Voice quality of VoIP

• VoIP quality and performance

• Dedicated connections

• Prioritise your voice over data traffic

Security

• Policies and procedures

• Hosting environment

• Network design and access

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Questions to Ask

• Is the hosting infrastructure shared or dedicated; how is it partitioned; are data security authentication/passwords applied?

• Who is hosting the servers; do they have good physical and network security?

• Are other authentication mechanisms like Secure ID used?

• Is constant monitoring provided and are proactive tools employed?

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Recommendations

• Match the scalability of the SBCs to your scalability requirements in the contact center.

• Ensure the survivability characteristics of the SBCs that will sufficient with redundancy to maintain operations at the local level and the broader geographic coverage level where network problems arise.

• Ensure required security and regulatory compliance issues will be satisfied by the selected SBC product prior to purchase.

• Before decide, check the potential operational efficiencies gained, economic payback, architecture and compliance issues.

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Thank You!

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