SonicWALL will be exhibiting at the VoiceCon conference in San Francisco, November 2-5, where the company will be discussing the rising use of VoIP, how to maintain high Quality of Service and low latency for voice traffic in a secure network environment. SonicWALL invites attendees to join them at booth #503 to view product demonstrations, join associated seminars and meet with executives to learn more about the new threats facing companies today and which questions to ask vendors when considering such voice deployments.

Managing the VoIP Bandwidth Conundrum

The movement to VoIP technologies for many companies brings more traffic to already crowded networks, busy with multiple other applications and data transfers. Network managers and administrators are now asked to work to maintain security levels at an absolute maximum to ensure the integrity of the corporate network, while securing suitable bandwidth for "heavy network-usage" applications such as VoIP. Key to the success of such deployments includes the ability to prioritize applications on the network (i.e. VoIP based apps), keeping connections clean to prevent viruses and other malware accessing the network and having visibility into all network traffic to better control it.

To achieve the above, companies should plan on using an Application Firewall within the IT infrastructure, providing them with granularity to decide which apps have access to the network and which don't. Such Firewalls also ensure a clean connection is always made by allowing it to tag VoIP traffic guaranteeing it the highest priority when receiving, inspecting, assembling and accepting VoIP content and is the best path to maximizing call quality and providing network protection.

VoIP Introduces New Threats

While the expansion of digital telephony and teleconferencing in today's business has brought VoIP into the mainstream, so too has it brought new threats into the corporate environment. Not only is VoIP vulnerable to classic network threats such as SPIT (Spam over Internet Telephony), phishing, Trojans, worms and viruses; it also introduces a slew of other threats to the corporate network including Eavesdropping, Interception (or call hijacking), Denial of Service attacks and more.

More key considerations when implementing a VoIP based deployment can be found at: http://www.sonicwall.com/us/products/resources/10661_14513.html