The emergence of remote and hybrid working over the past two years have changed the cybersecurity landscape. Security professionals no longer have the luxury of a workforce that’s solely in the office, and thus bad actors can exploit home networks and personal devices.
During this time, no IT system has become more dispersed than collaboration and communication applications. After all, unified communications (UC) platforms are inherently designed to keep people connected wherever they are. Their very purpose means that an outage can derail an organization and bring employee productivity to a halt.
As the threat landscape intensified, Akkadian Labs has highlighted four key ways that businesses can keep their UC platforms secure.
Restrict Access to the Back-end
The back-end of a UC system is the inner sanctum and, therefore, should be treated as such. Widespread access to the back end increases the risk of a bad actor entering the system and wreaking havoc – be they a bot, competitor, or disgruntled employee.
Despite the widespread risk of cyberattacks, it’s also essential for UC engineers to look closer to home, with honest employees potentially making mistakes when given direct access. Back-ends typically lack granular security controls, so inadequately trained workers can accidentally cause real damage.
These issues can be addressed by restricting back-end access to only the most senior UC engineers. Service management platforms are software layers that sit between users and the back-end, helping reduce errors that might cause service disruptions or even outages.
“This is not just a theoretical issue; it’s a real problem that people face,” David Levy, Director of Marketing at Akkadian Labs, said.
“We mitigate risk by limiting access to native products. Employees work in templates, and these templates are structured, so everyone does it the same way without actually going into the UC platform.”
Use Role-Based Access
Service management platforms let administrators customize each user’s privileges when carrying out moves, adds, changes, and deletes (MACDs). This might involve limiting what a person can do (perhaps they can add but not delete) or limiting the locations they’re able to work on.
Restricting access in this way means an operations team or HelpDesk personnel can become experts in certain workflows because they’re only carrying out a handful of different tasks.
Track User Activity
It’s important that a business can see an audit trail and establish the root cause of the problem in the event of an outage or service disruption. Service management platforms give UC engineers access to granular activity tracking to look back and see who made what changes and when. This isn’t always possible if the changes are made in the UC platform itself.
“This is important because you can go back and train that person to do it correctly in the future, so you don’t see ongoing mistakes,” Levy said.
Use a Single Pane of Glass to Minimize Errors and Increase Visibility
Making changes directly in UC platforms can expose an organization to user error, particularly if the user has to manually configure every service (calling, chat, video, voicemail, etc.).
Using a single pane of glass for MACDs across all individual UC applications reduces the chance of errors causing outages because data only needs to be inputted once.
Cybersecurity will only become a more prominent issue for all businesses as hybrid work drives digital transformation.
UC infrastructure is mission-critical and needs to be afforded the same security attention as other IT systems. Service management platforms give engineers total control of their UC estate, helping to reduce errors and keep them secure.
