Securing Large and Distributed Enterprise VoIP Infrastructure Using Border Elements

Despite an increasing enterprise adoption of IPbased real-time communication systems, large and distributed enterprises have not yet fully realized the benefits of such deployments. Our work explores the architectural challenges and security concerns of a fully IP-based real-time communication infrastructure in such large, multi-site, multivendor enterprises. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical architecture and analyze the importance of Border Elements in securing the VoIP infrastructure. To this end, we built a pilot environment and evaluated the suitability of Session Border Controllers as border elements in pure enterprise environments. Based on our deployment experiences and real-world evaluations, we posit that Session Border Controllers are an optimal solution for meeting the security and edge services requirements to enable transition to a fully IP-based voice infrastructure.