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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