How to combat voice security issues in collaboration platforms

Ironically, many of today’s voice threats stem from the technologies that make enterprise collaboration voice accessible from everywhere. While these collaboration systems are no doubt convenient, they create risks that were not plausible on traditional closed systems:

1. Compromised BYOD. Desktop and smartphone apps are now the de facto method of making and receiving internal and external business calls. In many cases, employees and contractors can use their personal laptops, phones and tablets to connect to business collaboration platforms. What keeps many cybersecurity professionals up at night is the potential that a hacker could access the corporate network through a voice collaboration app loaded on an unsecure personal device. Because organizations don’t own these devices, they can’t adequately manage BYOD OS and application updates.

2. SaaS platform compromises. SaaS voice applications can hamstring the ability of companies to oversee call manager platforms. Having a third party handle the responsibility of building, maintaining and securing voice and collaboration services is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, outsourcing these operations frees up the organization from managing servers, network operating systems and voice/collaboration services. On the other, it requires companies to place a tremendous trust in that service provider to properly manage and secure the service.

Additionally, large collaboration providers are a much bigger and potentially more lucrative target for bad actors. Thus, these providers are likely to be threatened with zero day vulnerabilities, DDoS attacks, malware and social engineering attempts. And because these companies serve a multitude of customers, a successful attack on a single provider has the…