Avaya extends SBC protection

Session border controllers are an increasingly important security component for organizations that leverage SIP trunking for voice-over-IP communications.

Avaya Inc. has extended its Session Border Controller for Enterprise (SBCE) to now offer more support for staff who work out of the office – but only if they use two popular Apple Inc. devices running Avaya softclients.

The company said Wednesday that SBCE will soon support its Avaya Flare Experience conferencing interface when used on iPads as well Avaya one-X Mobile softphone applications on Apple iPhones.

But now when out of the office iPad and iPhone users with Avaya apps can have a business-dedicated desk phone or softphone that authenticates to SBCE without connecting to a virtual private network (VPN). That saves the organization operational costs, Avaya says.

The new capabilities are available on version 6.2 of SBCE, which will be released in the second quarter.
An Avaya spokesman said support for Android devices is in the works.

A session border controller is an edge firewall that secures SIP-based communications between enterprises and carriers with intrusion detection, authentication and policy enforcement. Avaya says its SBC protects against denial of service attacks, application layer threats and toll fraud.

“It’s one thing to try to get a phone outside the enterprise to make a phone call in, as lots of vendors do,” said Addis Hallmark, technology solutions leader for Avaya’s unified communications group. “But we can address a full spectrum of security needs by encrypting the signaling and the media from the phone, by allowing IT to apply policies on the device and inspecting the (data) traffic at Layer 7.”

Users won’t have go through the cumbersome exercise of turning on a VPN on an enabled iPad or iPhone and loading credentials, he said.

Through Avaya’s Aura unified communications server, Flare lets users quickly set up voice, video and instant messaging communications by dragging contact information onto a launch point. It also consolidates messages.

One-X Mobile is a smart phone client that, through Aura, enables unified communications on handsets.

SBCE is sold by Avaya and its partners as a bundle on Dell servers. The Avaya SBCE-Dell Platform has a server with an Intel Xeon E3-1220 quad core CPUs that can manage up to 2,000 sessions at a time. The Avaya SBCE-Dell EMS three-server bundle is for those with high availability needs.

There’s also a bundle for small and medium-sized organizations that use Avaya IP Office unified communications suite that can manage up to 500 sessions at a time.