Patrick was joined by expert guests Kevin Isaacks, VP SaaS Solutions Engineering at Ribbon Communications and Joseph Fuccillo who is CTO at Nectar.
Nectar and Ribbon Communications have forged a partnership where they have developed a solution to monitor session border control devices (SBCs) within enterprise or service providers networks. This UCD system can identify potential networks issues and enable customers to prevent malicious attacks or to resolve other issues within unified communications solutions like Skype for Business.
Joe explains that SBCs not only have a completely different set of functions from traditional firewalls and other security devices but also provide a huge amount of data.
"There is a tremendous amount of information about the sessions that are passing through them, the quality of the sessions, the health, the trunks, the SIP connections that the SBC is securing both on the public and the private side."
The UCD can utilise this information to provide vital feedback for organisations. This can help an organisation, firstly, locate the exact area where an issue is taking place and also provide details about what type of service issue this might be. Kevin explained how understanding the data is extremely important.
"When you are talking about UCaaS services, taking the statistics (from SBCs) and visualising them in a way so that you can see what is going on in the network is very critical."
Kevin and Joe also explain that modern day encryption causes major issues when it comes to analysing network data but the UCD solution overcomes that.
"Encryption is a double edge sword. We know that our particular conversations can't be listened to by anybody. But it also means from a quality perspective we can't actually check what is going on with the call - it becomes effectively a black path we can't see into."
