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Clearing the Cloud for Reliable, Crystal-Clear VoIP Services

The compelling advantage of VoIP is that it is far cheaper than circuit switched technology. But VoIP calls often sound horrible. It doesn’t have to be this way. Although VoIP is intrinsically prone to jitter, delay and packet loss, good system design can mitigate all these impairments. The simplest solution is over-provisioning bandwidth.

The lowest bandwidth leg of a VoIP call, where the danger of delayed or lost packets is the greatest, is usually the ‘last mile’ WAN connection from the ISP to the customer premises. This is also where bandwidth is most expensive.

On this last leg, you tend to get what you pay for. Cheap connections are unreliable. Since businesses live or die with their phone service, they are motivated to pay top dollar for a Service Level Agreement specifying “five nines” reliability. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Modern network architectures achieve high levels of reliability through redundant low-cost, less reliable systems. For example, to achieve 99.999% aggregate reliability, you could combine two independent systems (two ISPs) each with 99.7% reliability, three each with 97.8% reliability, or four each with 94% reliability. In other words, if your goal is 5 minutes or less of system down-time per year, with two ISPs you could tolerate 4 minutes of down-time per ISP per day. With 3 ISPs, you could tolerate 30 minutes of down-time per ISP per day.

Here’s a guest post from Dr. Cahit Jay Akin of Mushroom Networks, describing how to do this:

Clearing the Cloud for Reliable, Crystal-Clear VoIP Services

More companies are interested in cloud-based VoIP services, but concerns about performance hold them back. Now there are technologies that can help.

There’s no question that hosted, cloud-based Voice over IP (VoIP) and IP-PBX technologies are gaining traction, largely because they reduce costs for equipment, lines, manpower, and maintenance. But there are stumbling blocks – namely around reliability, quality and weak or non-existent failover capabilities – that are keeping businesses from fully committing.

Fortunately, there are new and emerging technologies that can optimize performance without the need for costly upgrades to premium Internet services. These technologies also protect VoIP services from jitter, latency caused by slow network links, and other common unpredictable behaviors of IP networks that impact VoIP performance. For example, Broadband Bonding, a technique that bonds various Internet lines into a single connection, boosts connectivity speeds and improves management of the latency within an IP tunnel. Using such multiple links, advanced algorithms can closely monitor WAN links and make intelligent decisions about each packet of traffic to ensure nothing is ever late or lost during communication.

VoIP Gains Market Share

The global VoIP services market, including residential and business VoIP services, totaled $63 billion in 2012, up 9% from 2011, according to market research firm Infonetics. Infonetics predicts that the combined business and residential VoIP services market will grow to $82.7 billion in 2017. While the residential segment makes up the majority of VoIP services revenue, the fastest-growing segment is hosted VoIP and Unified Communications (UC) services for businesses. Managed IP-PBX services, which focus on dedicated enterprise systems, remain the largest business VoIP services segment.

According to Harbor Ridge Capital LLC, which did an overview of trends and mergers & acquisitions activity of the VoIP market in early 2012, there are a number of reasons for VoIP’s growth. Among them: the reduction in capital investments and the flexibility hosted VoIP provides, enabling businesses to scale up or down their VoIP services as needed. Harbor Ridge also points out a number of challenges, among them the need to improve the quality of service and meet customer expectations for reliability and ease of use.

But VolP Isn’t Always Reliable

No business can really afford a dropped call or a garbled message left in voicemail. But these mishaps do occur when using pure hosted VoIP services, largely because they are reliant on the performance of the IP tunnel through which the communications must travel. IP tunnels are inevitably congested and routing is unpredictable, two factors that contribute to jitter, delay and lost packets, which degrade the quality of the call. Of course, if an IP link goes down, the call is dropped.

Hosted, cloud-based VoIP services offer little in the way of traffic prioritization, so data and voice fight it out for Internet bandwidth. And there’s little monitoring available. IP-PBX servers placed in data centers or at the company’s headquarters can help by providing some protection over pure hosted VoIP services. They offer multiple WAN interfaces that let businesses add additional, albeit costly, links to serve as backups if one fails. Businesses can also take advantage of the various functions that an IP-PBX system offers, such as unlimited extensions and voice mail boxes, caller ID customizing, conferencing, interactive voice response and more. But IP-PBXes are still reliant on the WAN performance and offer limited monitoring features. Thus, users and system administrators might not even know about an outage until they can’t make or receive calls. Some hosted VoIP services include a hosted IP-PBX, which typically include back-up and storage and failover functions, as well as limited monitoring.

Boosting Performance through Bonding and Armor

Mushroom Networks has developed several technologies designed to improve the performance, reliability and intelligence of a range of Internet connection applications, including VoIP services. The San Diego, Calif., company’s WAN virtualization solution leverages virtual leased lines (VLLs) and its patented Broadband Bonding, a technique that melds various numbers of Internet lines into a single connection. WAN virtualization is a software-based technology that uncouples operating systems and applications from the physical hardware, so infrastructure can be consolidated and application and communications resources can be pooled within virtualized environments. WAN virtualization adds intelligence and management so network managers can dynamically build a simpler, higher-performing IP pipe out of real WAN resources, including existing private WANs and various Internet WAN links like DSL, cable, fiber, wireless and others. The solution is delivered via the Truffle appliance, a packet level load balancing router with WAN aggregation and Internet failover technology.

Using patented Broadband Bonding techniques, Truffle bonds various numbers of Internet lines into a single connection to ensure voice applications are clear, consistent and redundant. This provides faster connectivity via the sum of all the line speeds as well as intelligent management of the latency within the tunnel. Broadband Bonding is a cost effective solution for even global firms that have hundreds of branch offices scattered around the world because it can be used with existing infrastructures, enabling disparate offices to have the same level of connectivity as the headquarters without the outlay of too much capital. The end result is a faster connection with multiple built-in redundancies that can automatically shield negative network events and outages from the applications such as VoIP. Broadband Bonding also combines the best attributes of the various connections, boosting speeds and reliability.

Mushroom Networks’ newest technology, Application Armor, shields VoIP services from the negative effects of IP jitter, latency, packet drops, link disconnects and other issues. This technology relies on a research field known as Network Calculus, that models and optimizes communication resources. Through decision algorithms, Application Armor monitors traffic and refines routing in the aggregated, bonded pipe by enforcing application-specific goals, whether it’s throughput or reduced latency.

VoIP at Broker Houlihan Lawrence – Big Savings and Performance

New York area broker Houlihan Lawrence – the nation’s 15th largest independent realtor – has cut its telecommunications bill by nearly 75 percent by deploying Mushroom Networks’ Truffle appliances in its branch offices. The agency began using Truffle shortly after Superstorm Sandy took out the company’s slow and costly MPLS communications network when it landed ashore near Atlantic City, New Jersey last year. After the initial deployment to support mission-critical data applications including customer relationship management and email, Houlihan Lawrence deployed a state-of-the-art VOIP system and runs voice communications through Mushroom Networks’ solution. The ability to diversify connections across multiple providers and multiple paths assures automated failover in the event a connection goes down, and the Application Armor protects each packet, whether it’s carrying voice or data, to ensure quality and performance are unfailing and crystal clear.

Hosted, cloud-based Voice over IP (VoIP) and IP-PBX technologies help companies like Houlihan Lawrence dramatically reduce costs for equipment, lines, manpower, and maintenance. But those savings are far from ideal if they come without reliability, quality and failover capabilities. New technologies, including Mushroom Networks’ Broadband Bonding and Application Armor, can optimize IP performance, boost connectivity speeds, improve monitoring and shield VoIP services from jitter, latency, packet loss, link loss and other unwanted behaviors that degrade performance.

Dr. Cahit Jay Akin is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Mushroom Networks, a privately held company based in San Diego, CA, providing broadband products and solutions for a range of Internet applications.

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BYOD Cyber-Security. How concerned should you be?

According to ComputerWeekly.com, “Nearly half of firms supporting BYOD report data breaches.” PWC’s 2013 Information Security Breaches Survey said “9% of large organisations had a security or data breach in the last year involving smartphones or tablets.” But as you know, correlation is not causation, and those quotes may imply a greater danger from BYOD than has yet been observed.

One of the most authoritative and exhaustive analyses of cyber security is Verizon’s annual “Data Breach Investigations Report.” The 2013 edition of the report analyzes over 47,000 ‘security incidents,’ including 621 ‘data breaches.’ It says:

The “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) trend is a current topic of debate and planning in many organizations. Unfortunately, we don’t have much hard evidence to offer from our breach data. We saw only one breach involving personally-owned devices in 2011 and a couple more in 2012.

So if your main concern is corporate data breach, the situation is not yet as dire on the mobile side as it is on the non-mobile side. But the Verizon report cautions:

Obviously mobile malware is a legitimate concern. Nevertheless, data breaches involving mobile devices in the breach event chain are still uncommon in the types of cases Verizon and our DBIR partners investigate. However, we do expect them to make more of an appearance in our data as mobile payment systems continue to become more common.

Two reports that focus on mobile malware are Trend Micro’s “Mobile Threat and Security Roundup,” and one I mentioned in a previous post, BlueCoat’s “2013 Mobile Malware Report.”

According to Trend:

In 2012, we detected 350,000 malicious and high-risk Android app samples, showing a significant increase from the 1,000 samples seen in 2011. It took less than three years for malicious and high-risk Android apps to reach this number—a feat that took Windows malware 14 years.

Just as Windows malware varied, so did Android malware—around
605 new malicious families were detected in 2012. Premium service abusers, which charge users for sending text messages to a premium- rate number, comprised the top mobile threat type, with transactions typically costing users US$9.99 a month. And victims of mobile threats didn’t just lose money, they also lost their privacy. The issue of data leakage continued to grow as more ad networks accessed and gathered personal information via aggressive adware.

Aggressive adware in mobile devices are now similar to the notorious spyware, adware, and click-fraud malware rampant in the early days of the PC malware era. They, like PC malware, generate profit by selling user data. PC malware took advantage of loopholes in legitimate ads and affiliate networks, while today’s aggressive adware can cause data leakages that aren’t always limited to malicious apps. Even popular and legitimate apps can disclose data.

The BlueCoat report concurs with this assessment:

Mobile threats are still largely mischiefware – they have not yet broken the device’s security model but are instead more focused on for-pay texting scams or stealing personal information.

So mobile malware is exploding, but so far targeting individuals in relatively trivial thefts. The Trend report observes that mobile threats are recapitulating the history of computer threats, but faster. Expect to see the mobile device threat level increase.

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Mobile Malware Update

Blue Coat Systems has published an interesting report on the state of mobile malware. The good news is that in the words of the report “the devices’ security model” is not yet “broken.” This means that smartphones and tablets are still rarely hijacked by viruses in the way that computers commonly are.

Now for the bad news. On the Android side (though apparently not yet on the iOS side), virus-style hijackings have begun to appear:

Blue Coat WebPulse collaborative defense first detected an Android exploit in real time on February 5, 2009. Since then, Blue Coat Security Labs has observed a steady increase in Android malware. In the July-September 2012 quarter alone, Blue Coat
Security Labs saw a 600 percent increase in Android malware over the same period last year.

But this increase is from a minuscule base, and this type of threat is still relatively minor on mobile devices. Instead the report says, “user behavior becomes the Achilles heel.” The main mobile threats are from what the report calls “mischiefware.”

Mischiefware works by enticing the user into doing something unintentional. The two main categories of Mischiefware are:

  1. Phishing, which tricks users into disclosing personal information that can be used for on-line theft.
  2. Scamming, which tricks users into paying far more than they expect for something – like for-pay text (SMS) messages or in-app purchases. Even legitimate service providers can be guilty of this type of ‘gotcha’ activity, with rapacious international data roaming charges, or punitive overage charges on monthly ‘plans.’

“User behavior becomes the Achilles Heel” is hardly a revelation. A more appropriate phrase would be “User behavior remains the Achilles Heel,” since in this respect the mobile world is no different from the traditional networking world.

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Mobile Security and HTML5

Smartphones and tablets have plenty of computing power to host malware, and they are simultaneously connected to the Internet via a cellular connection and to the LAN via Wi-Fi. So everybody in your organization has a device capable of by-passing your firewall in their pocket.

The good news is that smartphone OSes were designed recently enough that their creators were able to build security into the platforms using techniques like ARM TrustZone, and “chain of trust.” Technologies of this type are merely optional on PCs. Plus,the Android and iPhone app stores tightly control the applications that they distribute, and most people don’t take the trouble to avoid this protection. With these system-level and application-level protections, smartphones and tablets are intrinsically less vulnerable than PCs.

But there’s plenty of bad news, too. The chain of trust isn’t foolproof, and malicious code can get through the app store certification process.

On top of these traditional threats, a new one looms: HTML 5. Adobe Flash is so notoriously vulnerable that Steve Jobs refused to let it onto the iPhone. Adobe has now thrown in the towel, and committed to HTML 5 instead. HTML 5 is presumably safer than Flash, but it is untried, and it has powerful access to the platform more akin to a native app than to traditional HTML.

This means that we can expect a rising tide of smartphone-related security breaches.

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Big Brother

Some ideas are so obvious once you hear them that you feel like you already had them yourself. One such is a new application for Wi-Fi from a company called Euclid Analytics.

Euclid’s idea is to provide Google Analytics-style information on foot traffic in retail stores. They implement it using the Wi-Fi on smart phones. This is technologically trivial: if you leave the Wi-Fi on your phone turned on, it will periodically transmit Wi-Fi packets, for example ‘probe requests.’ Every packet transmitted by a device contains a unique identifier for that device, the MAC address. So by gathering this information from a Wi-Fi access point, Euclid can tell how often and for how long each device is in the vicinity. Presumably enough people have Wi-Fi on their phones by now to gather statistically representative data for analytics purposes.

The Euclid technology doesn’t require your opt-in, and it doesn’t need to be tied to Wi-Fi. The concept can trivially be extended to any phone (not just Wi-Fi equipped ones) by using cellular packets rather than Wi-Fi, and for people with no phone, face recognition with in-store cameras. For this kind of application even 90% accuracy on the face recognition would be useful.

One of the only four choices on Euclid’s website’s navigation menu is Privacy. Privacy gets this prominent treatment because the privacy issues raised by this technology are immense.

Gathering this kind of information for one store – anonymous traffic by time, duration of stay, repeat visits and so on doesn’t seem too intrusive on individuals, but Euclid will be tempted to aggregate it across all the stores in the world, and to correlate its data with other data that stores already gather, like point of sale records.

Many technology sophisticates I talk with tell me that it is naive to expect any privacy whatsoever in the Internet age, and I guess this is another example. Euclid will effectively know where you are most of the time, but it won’t know much more than your cellular provider, or any any of the app vendors to whom you have given location permission on your phone.

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ABI projects rapid uptake of 802.11ac

An interesting graphic from ABI research projects ongoing rapid growth in Wi-Fi in phones out to 2017, when the penetration will be approaching 100%. This doesn’t seem to be unrealistically fast to me, since the speed at which feature phones have been displaced by low-cost smartphones implies that by that time practically all phones will be smartphones, and since carriers are increasingly attracted to Wi-Fi for data offload from their cellular networks.

The graphic also shows rapid transition from 802.11n to 802.11ac starting next year.

Wi-Fi Penetration in Mobile Handsets by Protocol World Market, Forecast 2010-2017

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ITExpo: Anatomy of Enterprise Mobility: Revolutionizing the Mobile Workforce

If you are going to ITExpo West 2012 in Austin, make sure you attend my panel on this topic at 10:00 am on Friday, October 5th.

The panelists are Brigitte Anschuetz of IBM, Akhil Behl of Cisco Systems, John Gonsalves of Symphony Teleca Corporation, Sam Liu of Partnerpedia and Bobby Mohanty of Vertical.

The pitch for the panel is:

Enterprise mobility is one of the fastest growing areas of business, allowing companies to virtually connect with customers and employees from anyplace in the world. CIOs are facing more decisions than ever when it comes to managing their mobile workforce. Employees expect to be able to do their work on multiple platforms, from desktops and laptops to tablets and smartphones.

This session will dive into the various components of an enterprise mobility solution, provide best practices to ensure they are successful and explain how they integrate together to enable companies to grow their business. Topics will include: mobile enterprise application platforms, enterprise app stores, mobile device management, expense management, and analytics.

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ITExpo: BYOD – The New Mobile Enterprise

If you are going to ITExpo West 2012 in Austin, make sure you attend my panel on this topic at 1:30 pm on Wednesday, October 3rd.

The panelists are Jeanette Lee of Ruckus Wireless, Ed Wright of ShoreTel and John Cash of RIM.

The pitch for the panel is:

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has been in full swing for a couple of years now, and there’s no going back. Enterprises have adopted a policy of allowing users to use their own devices to access corporate networks and resources. With it comes the cost savings of not having to purchase as many mobile devices, and user satisfaction increases when they are able to choose their preferred devices and providers (and avoid having to carry multiple devices). But the benefits don’t come without challenges — the user experience must be preserved, security policies must accommodate these multiple devices and operating systems, and IT has to content with managing applications and access across different platforms. This session looks at what businesses can do to mitigate risks and ensure performance while still giving your users the device freedom they demand.

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ITExpo: Enterprise SBC and UC Security Essentials

If you are going to ITExpo West 2012 in Austin, make sure you attend my panel on this topic at 10:00am on Wednesday, October 3rd.

The panelists are Scott Beer of Ingate Systems, Jeff Dworkin of Sangoma, Eric Hernaez of NeSatpiens, Mykola Konrad of Sonus Networks, Jack Rynes of Avaya and John Nye of Genband.

The pitch for the panel is:

Supported by Session Border Controllers (SBCs) and Unified Communications (UC), enterprises can enable workers to essentially carry their desk phone extensions and features with them, wherever they are working on any given day – via VoIP clients and other UC applications on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. With rich UC applications features such as call transfer, conference call, corporate directory listings, and presence, workers can collaborate and communicate in real-time, increasing productivity by maintaining an always one presence.

But wireless and Internet connected mobile devices present unique security challenges that differ dramatically from traditional communications and data security methods that rely on firewalls, user authentication, and encryption. Further, these mobile devices can expose sensitive network traffic, and proprietary or confidential data and communications, to multiple vulnerabilities.

Enterprises that have embraced SBCs, and other components of UC security, are proving they can securely protect and extend communications to external parties, unlocking new ways of collaborating with clients, partners, distributed employees and the supply chain. This session will consider the Enterprise SBC as a means of satisfying security and privacy requirements, with signaling and traffic encryption, media and signaling forking, network demarcation, and threat detection and mitigation, enabling enterprises to capture the cost benefits of VoIP and UC, while maintaining essential security postures and access to multi-mobile communications across the network, anytime, anywhere.