SIP Services have identified a number of application areas that can provide immediate benefits to an existing or new UC infrastructure - Security and Multi-Media recording and Discovery. These solutions guarantee UC based services are as secure and as functional as possible when compared to traditional-based telecommunications voice services.
As Frost & Sullivan analyst Shomik Banerjee identified, "VoIP security remains a crucial factor threatening to affect market growth; SIP security will have to support multiple intermediaries and endpoints, anonymity, call tracing as well as legal intercept and privacy protection. Vendors are advised to provide a secure infrastructure for multimedia/multi-modal communication over SIP, while also ensuring quality of service, reliability and scalability."
In their 2009 study Enterprise VoIP market trends 2009-2012, Osterman Research stated "the number of VoIP users continue to grow" they added, "based on each user placing and receiving 30 calls per day VoIP translates into a substantial cost saving even for medium sized organisations" and finally "the most common concern about VoIP services was security".
The protocols in use within a UC infrastructure and between UC networks are not those normally found in conventional IP based data networks that would typically be secured from unauthorised access via a public network by an IP firewall, as such UC networks connected to the Internet need alternate security solutions to those provided for pure data services.
