Carriers are examining different strategies to staff to meet the needs of an IP transition. Some carriers will be able to leverage existing in-house expertise at the data layer, while others will look outside the organization to hire a few key players to lead the transition. Some carriers will turn toward third-party providers for access to transition expertise.

However, in every model, close collaboration will multiply the effectiveness of your staff. The people in place need to be in a position to work together, not in segregated silos, to understand and develop the new skill sets they need. Cross-training between voice and data network teams, for instance, can lead to VoIP experts, who can in turn evangelize entire teams.

Even those organizations relying on third-party experts will need in-house staff knowledgeable enough to challenge assumptions around design decisions, network-based policies, or business processes in order to drive the best results.

There are a number of options now available to carriers as they make the transition into IP based networks, however it is up to each carrier to determine the models that meet their business objectives, their personnel core competencies as well as their internal system infrastructure goals in order to successfully plan and execute their transition intentions with the right staffing skills, experience and capabilities.

The skill sets that your staffs are going to need now are not the same as those they will need during and after an IP transition. Your voice and network staffs have probably already thought through these issues, but what about your back office and systems integration teams? They will need to come up to speed on new devices & protocols, providing additional data fields and points of interconnect which will drive changes in techniques for retrieval, delivery & mediation, inducing updated architectures and modeling for existing system adjustments and possibly set in motion initiatives toward new system implementations.

In order to meet the expertise demand it is imperative that Organizations tap into the significant pool of IP voice experience available today, and proper recruiting can help bring in key transition leaders. In order to leverage these resources it will be critical to expand and conduct training and knowledge sharing to develop deep and long-term expertise in your team. Online training, boot camps, vendor-driven training and peer training are all good routes to explore to assist employees with the willingness and capability to learn to capture new skills.

Even individual employees can take meaningful, proactive steps to prepare for an IP transition. There is a wealth of online resources that can be leveraged, including whitepapers, research effort, standards bodies, books and simulations that are free or low cost, and each of these options can provide meaningful expertise that can be leveraged for future growth.

Carriers concern themselves with IP security threats on their own networks, as well as along interfaces with their partner networks. How to manage these threats and limit exposure to your own network is a constant concern.

The core of the matter is enforcing best practices on your network at the physical, logical and management layers. The right people have to have access to the right equipment, deploying the proper configurations while also ensuring that unauthorized use is not exposing your network to compromise, is properly monitored and is not tolerated. Security best practices are certainly desirable on the partner side of the network, and it’s important to maintain protection for your network at the seams in agreements made with your interconnect partners. Some areas of focus include obscuring your network typology to protect your core and your customers, establishing overload protection to prevent system overloads to impact your core network and impact your customers performance, implementation or flexibility to allow for nat-traversal to limit exposure of public-private network interfaces, and installing and updating session-border controllers are constructive strategies to mitigate risks to your customers and core network systems.

Industry-wide security guidelines for partner networks are a work in progress and these guidelines will be evolving foundation principles geared to make managing partner relationships and securing VOIP inter carrier relationships. For example the GSMA has laid out a “security code of conduct” for mobile operators transitioning to IP networks for their voice and signaling traffic, and these principles need to translate not just to mobile partners but to other types of voice operators, as well. Even in the absence of such guidelines, it is important to note that security practices have continuously evolved over the years as new forms of communications and models are formed, for carrier partners, enterprises, as well as for end customers.

Educating the people within your organizations and continually evolving your policies leads to solidifying security not just for your network but also for your customers and partners.

Enforcing security best practices is a multi-faceted effort. Let’s investigate carrier-side issues first.

The initial step is to identify the types of threats faced. There are several potential security risks that IP administrators and service providers have to look at in VoIP. There are threats against availability, confidentiality, data integrity, social context. Some of these threats show themselves in DOS attacks, eavesdropping, viruses, malware, spitting, toll fraud, protocol vulnerability, or vulnerabilities in soft-phone applications.

Safeguarding against risk means having proper prevention, detection and mitigation measures in place. Harden your equipment. Install the latest patches, as firmware and software upgrades will allow you to benefit from already-exposed and corrected vulnerabilities. Ensure you have the right perimeter defense. Deploy proper solutions at the edges to allow traffic between trusted and untrusted solutions. Proper planning and execution allow the proper ports and protocols to provide communication required, and having the appropriate authentication for your users – whether they are individual users or carriers coming on to your network are ideal best practices. If viable, run traffic over VPNs to minimize eavesdropping. Segment your VoIP traffic via VLANs and isolate or segment it from data traffic. Encryption can also be deployed, but it has to be at a measured level so you don’t encounter service quality issues.

By using common sense, appropriate security devices and exercising best practices, VoIP security issues can be addressed. Partner networks raise other security issues, which we will also investigate.

We started with the GSMA recommendations to plan our test case, focusing on the items we knew we could execute, and that made the most sense in light of future commercial rollouts.

During the course of the trials we solved several interesting technical challenges, but we were encouraged to discover that these were configuration differences rather than interoperability issues. Converting from the ANSI specifications used by our US partner to the ITU variant used by the European operator was initially a challenge, which we addressed once we had a full picture of each environment.

We also found the test environment contained different implementations of SIP I, so we modified or eliminated some parameters that were causing problems. Attention to detail was an important component of our success – for instance, resolving a difference in the way two SIP environments treated a plus sign from the E.164 specification in the URI field was one of the fixes we implemented.

We were tremendously pleased with the results we achieved. We showed that interconnections could work on private MPLS networks, and the public Internet as well. We also showed we could effectively monitor and troubleshoot the interconnection to provide the right quality for end customers. Most important for commercial implementations, we also now know we can manage billing off of the interconnect.

-Jim K., Engineering

Carriers are examining different strategies to staff to meet the needs of an IP transition. Some carriers will be able to leverage existing in-house expertise at the data layer, while others will look outside the organization to hire a few key players to lead the transition. Some carrierswill turn toward third-party providers for access to transition expertise.

However, in every model, close collaboration will multiply the effectiveness of your staff. The people in place need to be in a position to work together, not in segregated silos, to understand and develop the new skill sets they need. Cross-training between voice and data network teams, for instance, can lead to VoIP experts, who can in turn evangelize entire teams.

Even those organizations relying on third-party experts will need in-house staff knowledgeable enough to challenge assumptions around design decisions, network-based policies, or business processes in order to drive the best results.

There are a number of options now available to carriers as they make the transition into IP based networks, however it is up to each carrier to determine the models that meet their business objectives, their personnel core competencies as well as their internal system infrastructure goals in order to successfully plan and execute their transition intentions with the right staffing skills, experience and capabilities.

The skill sets that your staffs are going to need now are not the same as those they will need during and after an IP transition. Your voice and network staffs have probably already thought through these issues, but what about your back office and systems integration teams? They will need to come up to speed on new devices & protocols, providing additional data fields and points of interconnect which will drive changes in techniques for retrieval, delivery & mediation, inducing updated architectures and modeling for existing system adjustments and possibly set in motion initiatives toward new system implementations.

In order to meet the expertise demand it is imperative that Organizations tap into the significant pool of IP voice experience available today, and proper recruiting can help bring in key transition leaders. In order to leverage these resources it will be critical to expand and conduct training and knowledge sharing to develop deep and long-term expertise in your team. Online training, boot camps, vendor-driven training and peer training are all good routes to explore to assist employees with the willingness and capability to learn to capture new skills.

Even individual employees can take meaningful, proactive steps to prepare for an IP transition. There is a wealth of online resources that can be leveraged, including whitepapers, research effort, standards bodies, books and simulations that are free or low cost, and each of these options can provide meaningful expertise that can be leveraged for future growth.